


Tiger Squadron: Factions

by BaelPenrose



Series: Tiger Squadron [5]
Category: Military Science Fiction - Fandom, Original Work, Science Fiction - Fandom
Genre: Earth is Space Australia, Earth is a Deathworld, F/M, HFY, Humans are space orcs, Multi, Original Science Fiction, PTSD, Platonic Hurt/Comfort, Pregnancy, Racism, fantastical racism but still, humans are badass, humans are cool, obvious nazi imagery, oh yeah, still no smut though, that's probably a big one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 29,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BaelPenrose/pseuds/BaelPenrose
Summary: Jake and Callie once more fail retirement
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Female Character
Series: Tiger Squadron [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1695037
Kudos: 17





	1. Reactivation

Jake looked up from his tinkering as Callie called out to him. “Jake, you hear about this? Adisa got found innocent about the New Path incident. Federation don’t believe it. The Consortium’s getting rich selling to both sides, and the Keldebriar are preparing to start fighting with the Alliance.”

Jake shrugged. “Yeah, glad Adisa’s fine. And?” he had a hunch of where this was going. Peace had been nice. Living with Namna had been nice. Attending Galri ceremonies had been cool. Learning some machining from the Palnt had been fun. Cuddling and having sex in an actual bed had been great.

But he knew there was a part of him that had been dying to go back to the stars with Callie since the honeymoon had ended. As much as they both wanted to deny it, there was now a part of them that only felt alive when soaring through the endless void with each other on the comms and nothing but possibilities ahead.

“We’re getting reactivated. To train a new squadron. Apparently, there are some new Sabers waiting for us.”

**

Saying farewell to Namna was always hard. Imdi as well, now that xe had become a friend to them. But duty had called, and Namna understood something about her siblings. They loved peace. They enjoyed being at home with the ones they loved. But she suspected there was a great deal of them that was still culturally human, and could never resist the challenge.

So, she walked them to the spaceport, and told them something. “The Aid Corps is getting reactivated too. I have a new rescue officer with me. His name is Lee Shen. He’s the son of the Rhino Tank commander, just enlisted. Told me to say hi to you two.” She hugged them. “Glad you’ll be out there to help if I run into trouble.”

“Always, sis.” Callie gave her a smile as they got into their battered Mark II Sabers and began the takeoff sequence.

**

Jake and Callie arrived at Fleet Command on Tenebras, and reported to the landing field they were told to. A fussy fleet logistics officer approached them, a Palnt. “Tiger Squadron, correct? We’ve assisted your people in building a new Saber system, far better than the old Mark IIs. You’re actually behind on quite a few upgraded models, Ma’am, sir. If you’d come with me I can show you the new…”

He babbled on for quite some time as Jake and Callie traded a smile. Then they saw the hangar where their new fighters were, and a part of both of them screamed with excitement. “Of course, you will be able to get your peculiar custom coloration on these ships, since that is now a major part of the legend and image that you humans find so important as a weapon and shield for morale. The Mark VII has considerable upgrades, and is composed of high-density alloys and reactive armor, allowing for greater survivability in the face of kinetic impact. Shielding is still electromagnetic fields engineered for a logarithmic deflection pattern through electrostatic repulsion, albeit the shields are more efficient in power management so they should last longer.” The two pilots were listening with half an ear while admiring the sleeker, shinier versions of their sabers, ones that would easily be painted in their colors, and would be all the more stylish as a form of transport.

“Further, the thrusters can interact with the shielding system, which was tricky to engineer but it was a way of allowing near perfect 180-degree turns within a sixty meter radius at optimal sublight speed, with automatically varying inertial compensation to prevent your bones from liquefying should you attempt such a maneuver. This will allow roughly a 60% increase in maneuverability over the Mark V or Mark VI, and I have not actually crunched the numbers on what to expect in comparison to the Mark II. You’ll also be moving faster, due to a few advances made thanks to combining Palnt and human machining, the energy system know runs on a molecular distortion matrix that creates a low-grade perpetual motion engine using a superconductive substance as the activator.” 

They swapped a look. “Goddamn this is going to be a wet dream to fly…”

The Palnt continued, oblivious to the star pilot’s glee, “In addition, your targeting and weapon suites have been optimized, while manual targeting is still well within the capabilities of this system, you will be able to aim significantly further out due to superior sensor suites. Weapon systems have likewise been upgraded. Your new mass driver systems fire 2cm tungsten teardrops at a velocity of .3c, using a controlled antimatter annihilation as the primer. Not only will this spare you the annoyance of draining your fuel systems in order to power rail guns, the extra power from that actually bleeds back into charging some of the other weapons we have installed, or charging the shields if you need it. Also, your kinetic weapons should impact with considerably more force, and due to the smaller, faster projectiles you should be able to pack some thirty six thousand before needing a reload, as opposed to the Mark II’s twenty-four thousand. Your missile systems now use a considerably better gravatar-implosion management, allowing your former 10kt warhead to be replaced with six 12kt torpedoes. Your lancer missiles have likewise tripled in number and gained a 20% increase in firepower per missile. Energy weapons are available as well, albeit not terribly impressive on fighters, existing as small plasma bolt casters, charged by the energy backwash of your kinetic weapon discharge.”

Callie whistled. “That’s…amazing. Okay, we’re trying this out.”

The Palnt winced. “Alright, but try not to injure yourselves, these things are considerably higher powered than…” It didn’t get to finish before Jake and Callie dived into their cockpits and activated the systems, beginning launch. They took skyward, practicing maneuvers and engaging in a mock dogfight with each other. The Palnt engineer simply watched, in awe of human skill and recklessness, shaking his head.

Mad. Humans were completely mad. And yet…

Jake and Callie landed a few hours later, jumping out of the cockpits, clearly gleeful. “Alright, just a couple changes we’d request. Make it possible to dial down inertial compensators a little bit, it was hard to feel what we were doing, which made a few of the maneuvers harder than they should have been.”

“Less inertia. Made maneuvering…harder? What?!”

Lieutenant Andala giggled. “Yes, harder. It’s good to not get liquefied but it’s also important for human pilots to feel some of what they’re doing. Lets instinct be a little more useful.”

“Instinct? In a void space battle?”

The ensign chuckled. “Yeah, in a space battle. Oh, and if you could attach a music player to the comms system? It helps synchronize maneuvers sometimes. I know you’ve heard of Tiger Squadron listening to music during battles, but we also use it as a signal.”

The Palnt sputtered at these absolutely – his own tongue didn’t have a word to describe their lunacy, so he simply borrowed one of their own, after all, how better to describe humans than in human language? – BATSHIT insane beings and their batshit insane requests because they were the best pilots in the galaxy and it was rapidly driving him batshit insane. His legs still twitched nervously every time he stepped aboard a human ship, ever since meeting “Stabby” the Roomba aboard the Fourth Armada’s flagship.


	2. Compassion for the Hurting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Namna reaches out to a survivor of a pirate attack

The crew of the Always Hope was on a homeward rotation, but for the Aid Corps crew chief, Namna of the Lalia clan of Nathians, still had work to do. There had been a call. Most of the hostages of the Sclunter pirate bases on the moons not far from here had been allowed to return home after Wolf Regiment’s rescue. But there were a few who’d remained on station, not sure what to do with themselves. One remained, still, in a safe holding cell.

The undersized Galri was still shaking, heavily, as Namna approached. “Kaisa, are you okay?”

The Galri shuddered and refused to answer, then said, “The machines here are awful. Is there any way I could get on a coralglider back home?” 

“I can certainly send orders for one, but I need to talk to you. The other prisoners told me about the Sclunter, what they did. You’re safe now.”

“Am I? I’m…those things know my people distrust machines, and hate them after how the Vulpexi Dominion used them against us. So the first thing they do when they grab a group of Galri…they grab up one who fights and grind them under the gears of a machine to scare the others. I can still hear my brother…his bones…And once that was done they told me I’d be used to create more pirates, just like the Dominion used us to create more of their conscript caste! I was the only life-forger aboard, and they told me every time I refused that they’d feed another of my kin to the gears!”

The Galri’s body curled, xer ear flaps covering xer eyes as Namna held them, only to shove her away. “GET AWAY! I WANT TO BE OUT OF THIS LIFELESS METAL HULK! Get me back home, away from metal, away from the whir of…”

Namna ordered the glider, mildly afraid of the Galri’s wrath. Despite their pacifistic, life-honoring ways, the amphibious beings were still capable in hand-to-hand, and far stronger than one would expect. Forcing down her fear of violence, she held herself at a safe distance. “I am so, so sorry, Kaisa.” She let that sit. “They had no right to do that to you. I’m glad Jaegar came down on them.” She paused again, then reached out a single paw. “It does get better though. The nightmares go away. I watched my father’s ship fall. The day my brother and sister came back. I watched his ship burn and take him with it when the Vulpexi attacked my clan.” Kaisa looked up and Namna held out a paw. "I promise it gets better. Support from people who care about you helps. I’ll stay with you until the coral glider gets here, and I’ll ride it back to your world with you as long as my home rotation lasts. And I’ll detail an Aid Corps psychologist to help you through it, maybe with the help of one of your people’s healers if you need it. Okay?”

Kaisa twitched, then returned the embrace. “Thank you, Chief Namna.”

“Of course.” Namna held the Galri for a bit, glad that she chose this path, to heal and support people who survived the worst of what happened in the grim darkness of space. They waited together for the coral glider, the incredible living ships of the Galri, to take Kaisa home.


	3. Wolves on the Hunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaegar fighting Sclunter

Hann Jaegar and the handful of the men of Wolf Division with him boarded the transport ship without complaint. It was a civilian ship, their leave had come to a close. He’d been kept busy, his recent promotions to Major General, and Wolf Regiment’s slow growth into Wolf Division had certainly taken some adjustment. Like Tiger Squadron, where reckless ace pilots were reassigned, Wolf Division had become home to the roughest, most hardcore infantry the Terran Republic had to offer.

His ID had caused a bit of nervousness from the Nathian pilot of the transport ship; something that crushed Jaegar to see. He didn’t mind so much, but the increased fear of humans by the other Alliance races had to be difficult on Jake and Callie, since they spent more time living amongst the other species than they did their own species. On the flipside, Jaegar supposed, Nathians took adoption rites very seriously, to the point where the renewed nervousness around humans might not actually apply to them – to the Nathian worldview, where family was everything and chosen family trumped bloodlines, those two might well be considered funny looking Nathians in every possible sense.

He and his men boarded the transport, allowed to retain their personal weapons that they’d brought on leave, which was to say, just the swords, which were all they’d ever really have used on a ship anyway. Energy weapons had a bad habit of accidentally igniting atmospheric storage and kinetic weapons sometimes led to hull breaches. Certainly, older-style combustion-based weapons wouldn’t have the same issue, but those also didn’t get through the armor that even space pirates usually wore, so for the purposes of shipboard combat everyone was pretty effectively back to swords, just like the days of the wooden ships of a wet navy. Swords had advanced as well, in all fairness, now able to be sharpened to an edge width of one macromolecule, able to cut through just about anything.

A Palnt was sitting next to him, and spoke quietly. “You’re Jaegar, right? The commander of Wolf Regiment?” 

“It’s a division now, but yes. Why?”

“Just wanted to say thank you. Your unit spearheaded the attack on Dacas II that resulted in freedom for my Iticos, my…it doesn’t translate well into Galick, but you humans would call it a etnick group. A sort of sub-grouping within the Palnt, based on ancestry.”

Jaegar paused, the other being had somewhat mangled the pronunciation, and then nodded. “Oh ethnic group. Well, glad to have been of help. Kind of the job. So what do you guys do?”

“Each iticos is known for a certain specialty of craft, which is how we have stayed reliant on one another. One makes arms or armor, several make ships, several make luxury goods, some simply build buildings, or ground transport. My people’s specialty has been in dwellings for centuries. Yours, Major General?”

“My people…my ethnic group were known for engineering and for warriors.” He left out his nation’s greatest shame, deciding that stories of that were probably best left for humans, ones who could learn from the mistake, while simultaneously not spreading information that would make it even harder for their allies to trust them.

“You’ve done them proud, Jaegar. What did you say they were called?” 

“My group? Germans. And yours?”

“Tarnis.”

Jaegar smiled and shook hands with the Palnt and said, “Good to meet you, uhm…I actually don’t know your name.”

“Breckna.” 

“Glad to ride with you.”

The Palnt had other questions, as well. “So, Jaegar, if I may ask, and I apologize if this is inappropriate, I have not seen many humans of your pigmentation, or the Viper’s, for that matter. Are you from a different group than most?”

Jaegar shook his head. “Truth is, most humans these days are of mixed ancestry. Centuries ago there were a lot more as pale as me or as dark as Adisa. Humans weren’t quite as smart as the Palnt, I guess. Took us a while to realize our sub-groups, as you put it, all relied on each other until after they’d all started intermarrying.” That brought about an interesting pause, then the Palnt shrugged. 

“Suppose it makes sense that a species as tough as yours would take a while to learn to work together. Bonding or not, you humans are pretty capable as individuals. I imagine that would make teamwork a bit harder, sometimes.”

Jaegar reminded himself that individualism was considered alien to the Palnt, who’d evolved in an environment where co-operative communism had been far more practical than it had ever been among human beings. “Sometimes, though we’ve figured it out.”

“We’re all products of our worlds, no?” Jaegar nodded, chuckling a bit.

There was a pause as the ship departed the station and began moving, gradually building to relativism in a pace so slow that Jaegar chuckled to think of what Jake, Callie, or even his older, more stable near-equal in rank Commander Hendrix, would think of the hesitancy of the other species of the Alliance.

Jumping to FTL and then coming to a crashing halt as alarms blared only a few moments later led to Jaegar all but vaulting out of his seat, ripping his saber free of the sheath and shouting, “WOLF DIVISION MARINES, TO ARMS! Pirates are boarding the ship. Be careful and clean ‘em out, not a single civilian casualty. Not a single enemy survivor.”

The Nathian captain’s voice cut over the intercom. “Everyone aboard remain calm while ship security and the volunteer marines deal with the pirates. We’ll be back underway in a few minutes, but for now please remain where you are and do not interfere with security.”

Jaegar chuckled as he and his marines, plus the squad of Marines, not Wolf Division, slated to defend civilian transport against pirates, formed up in careful angles around the boarding zone, waiting until the door opened and charging. Immediately spotting the Sclunter’s ugly, leering hyena faces he began slicing through as fast as he could. He didn’t mind fighting Sclunter. Unlike the Tyrsians, who now that they’d developed away from the Vulpexi actually seemed pretty similar to the Vikings, in having a complex society that valued warfare a little more than was healthy but had its redeeming features, the Sclunter seemed to just be maniacs who survived by plundering everyone else. 

A few of the pirates had gamma-blast weaponry, now outlawed by the Federation, Keldebriar, Consortium and Alliance alike for the hideous cruelty of irradiating a target to death, but it didn’t matter too much in quarters this close, the pirates couldn’t fire without annihilating each other.

The sword-work was quick and bloody, and the yellow blood of the Sclunter wound up painting the walls of the boarding chamber, only for Jaegar to lead a boarding unit onto the Sclunter ship, quickly overcome what defenders they had left and kill their leader, who put up a decent contest with him, sword-to-sword before Jaegar drove his saber between the pirate leader’s eyes.

A few hostages were rescued from the bowels of the Sclunter ship, and they were quickly carried back over to the transport for safety. Jaegar ordered the marines to loot the fuel for the pirate ship and send it back over to the transport, and the atmospheric tanks to make up for the extra passengers. 

Then, almost as an afterthought and because he was tired of the brass bitching about him going over his ammunition budget, he had his boys loot the power cells for the enemy guns, which could be modified to power their own plasma weaponry.

Then he left demolition charges near the pirate ship’s reactor, just…well, because fuck the pirates, really.

The transport arrived at its destination a few hours later, the pirate rigger destroyed behind them. The rescuees were put into contact with their families, and Jaegar shook hands with the Palnt he’d spoken to earlier. “Alright, I’ll see you around.”

“You as well, Jaegar.”

Reuniting with his own forces, he delivered the mission brief. “Apologies for the delay, but there was a bit of a pirate problem en route. Which brings me to our mission today. According to the tracking of these pirates, they’re based on a terraformed moon a jump or two from here. Since we don’t know if they’re holding any hostages, they can’t just send Lion Fleet to bomb it out. So we’re being sent in to clean it out. Get there, kill every Sclunter in the zone, rescue any hostages, and get out. You know the drill.” 

The Lupa III, the new division transport, was nice. Hot food, workshop where the troops took it in turns to convert the captured power cells, decent onboard barracks, exercise facilities for when they were docked for long periods of time. Approaching the pirate base, Wolf Division entered their drop pods and prepared for deployment, loaded up with energy weaponry, the better for close-quarters engagements. No worries about ricochets.

“Wolf Division, drop, drop, drop!” 

Hitting the ground, Jaegar howled, the rest of his troops mirroring the action. It wasn’t much more than a battle cry, but damn did it seem to freak the pirates out. The battle only took a few hours, with minimal casualties due to being in full armor. Over three thousand marauders killed, six Wolves killed, mostly due to bad luck, and two hundred hostages located and secured. And more power cells and explosives. It was almost as though the munitions budget was kept purposely low to encourage looting and minimize manufacturing strain. The pirate base too, had its computer cores stripped for any useful information Intelligence could use to find other bases, and then had its reactors sabotaged to explode in spectacular manner after the marines and hostages departed.

One of the Nathians who had just been rescued, it turned out, was an enlistee of Aid Corps who’d been MIA for some time, and was able to direct, after a few hours of recovery, the medical crew in helping out the other prisoners.

Jaegar, when the paperwork was done, took a quick question from her. “So, I was not given to understand that humans were supposed to make use of enemy munitions, is that a widespread practice?”

He chuckled a bit. “Not supposed to be. But if they wanted us to follow the rules, they would have done more than triple the ammo budget back from when this was a regiment. I have about six times as many troops, so I wind up with half the ammo I need on my current spreadsheet, so looting it is.”

The Nathian started laughing, hard. “Wait, wait, so even military regulations aren’t always followed? And your budgets can be kept low and still work because of jury rigging?”

Jaegar started laughing too. “Yeah, I know. Humans are crazy.”

The Nathian nodded. “Yeah. But you’re the best kind of insane. You bond with other species, and you make any situation work. Glad you all made it to the stars.” That earned the Nathian a smile.


	4. Interview with Commander Hendrix

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Endirmas Blorgi's interview with Shiloh Hendrix

Endirmas stepped off the small shuttle. Supposedly, the legendary Commander Shiloh Hendrix of Lion Fleet, the leader who’d led the Nova bombing of the Killick First Queen’s nest and been one of two turning points in the campaign to stop the Apocrypha during the Kyriion crisis, was here. She was off her own flagship, the Lionheart, while it was being repaired on the nearby station, temporarily visiting an old friend in 4th Armada. 

Endirmas’s pods clacked across the floor, the artificial chitin of his species’ constructed exoskeletons ringing against the steel floors as he craned his eyestalks to see the Commander.

“Ma’am, ma’am,” he called, finally spotting her, waving his three-fingered hands and hoping she’d spot him. “I’m a friend of Adisa’s and a scholar trying to learn about your species. I’ve heard a lot of stories about you and I’d really like to get an interview. I have a book I’m trying to write about the rise of your species as a part of the galactic community and I’m working on military interviews from those who represent the best of the human warrior class and I was told you were – OUCH!” The excited Vulpexi cut himself off, skin pulsing in pain and eyes twisting down to spot a small disk, one of the cleaning robots common to human ships, with a knife strapped to it. The tip had barely pierced his exoskeleton, but the very tip had a splotch of yellow blood on it.

“What is that and why does it have a knife on it?” Commander Hendrix was laughing, softly. “Oh, that’s just Stabby the Roomba. Some maniac duct taped a knife to him as a practical joke, but the crew of this ship apparently got attached to the little guy and since he did accidentally manage to cripple a Sclunter and confuse the shit out of them during the Dominion War with your people’s old government…”

Endirmas dipped his eyestalks. “Ah. I see. But if it’s part of security for the ship, should they not all have knives attached?”

Shiloh shook her head. “Nah. It’s special, just for him.”

“You call it a ‘he’ but robots don’t have any gender, at least ours do not. Are yours different?”

“Not really, we just kinda…name them and get attached, act like they’re people, ya know?”

Endirmas leveled his eyestalks at her and said, in what he hoped was a good impression of the human concept of sarcasm, which Adisa had enjoyed teaching him a great deal, “I actually do not know any such thing.”

“Ah. Well, um…do your species keep pets?”

“Pets…small animals that humans keep for companionship, correct? Adisa told me about them. And we…do not.” Endirmas said, mournfully. “The Dominion had a very utilitarian view. Animals that served no practical purpose to either us or to maintaining the stability of our ecosystem were disposed of.” 

Shiloh frowned. “Ack, that’s bloody disgusting. Your old government got what it deserved. I have a cat in my personal quarters, if you want to meet it.” Endirmas’s eyestalks went fully erect and his pods clacked against the floors in excitement. “I would be honored. Is this a sign of trust among humans?” He was already taking notes. 

“Allowing you to meet one’s pets? Sort of? So, can I ask you something? Most of the Vulpexi I’ve met, even after the surrender, don’t like humans much. Why do you?”

“Oh, I just…you’re fascinating. You bond to things that are objectively useless and even though you could roll over just about everything in the galaxy, except MAYBE the Keldebriar, you prefer peace with them. It’s an interesting outlook, one that the old dominion just didn’t give enough credit to, and the fact that you’re all so factional, that there are some who want to conquer everything and some who just want to learn or explore or befriend that keep the conquerors in check…you’re just fascinating.”

Shiloh couldn’t keep the grin off her face as the Vulpexi petted the cat, his cool carapace sliding over the cat’s fur as it purred. “It looks like the creatures that your ships are named after.”

“It is. Same family. Smaller.”

“You domesticate relatives of apex predators? And then keep them for companionship?”

“Yes.” 

“Humans…sorry, may I ask you other questions?”

Shiloh smiled as the cat jumped into her lap. “Sure.”

“You seem to keep dangerous things for companionship, and name your most powerful units after the wildlife of your world, why?”

“Well, Jake and Callie painted tiger stripes on their sabers, and once it became apparent that our world was unusual, the rest of us kept up the pattern. Our world is the reason we became what we did, it just made sense to remind the galaxy of that.”

Endirmas nodded. “Is it true that you refused to expel Lieutenant Andala from the airlock despite her being infected with Kyriion, a disease you knew was almost certain to be fatal, and one that was known for annihilating entire species. But you didn’t give up on her. Why?”

“I helped teach that girl everything she knows about being a Naval officer. Figured she deserved a chance to fight Kyriion before we just assumed she was dead.”

“And you were right.”

“And I was right. Ivari kept keeping secrets, and made the mistake of betting against humans.”

Endirmas nodded and took notes. “Got it. And you were critical in holding the line against the Synthor’s Apocrypha, any comment there?”

“Humans aren’t the type to give up when they see something like that. We used to hunt mammoths. Just have to keep going long enough and eventually, you wear out your target and can bring it down.”

“They were machines, though. And I have reports that humans could outfly them, somehow.”

“That’s Tiger Squadron, you’d have to talk to them about that. I was the one who could keep hammering them with big guns to keep the Apocrypha from being able to advance.”

Endirmas wriggled, then nodded. “Thank you for your time. It’s good to learn about your people.” He started making an exit, then gave a quiet nod and gentle gesture of affection towards the knife Roomba. “Hello, Stabby.” He quickly got back to his shuttle. Hendrix sat back down in her chair. “Did I just have a fun interview with a Vulpexi?”


	5. First Skirmish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First clash, Tiger Squadron vs. Keldebriar

The Mark V sabers handled like a dream, now that the inertial dampeners had been just a little bit reduced. The sound systems were even better, once they’d been worked in. Wasn’t the Squadron’s proper anthem playing right now, though. No, for just showing off to a new squadron, there were other songs that worked much better. 

The new squadron was of proper size, just over two hundred batshit insane ace saber pilots who’d trained like mad and proven themselves skilled enough to be wasted on units that believed in sane or standard maneuvers. So they’d been transferred to the reforming Tiger Squadron and had gleefully painted the legendary scarlet and azure tiger stripes on their fighters.

Training had been interesting, a few ace pilots gaping at them, but Callie, her husband and faithful second ever at her side, had disabused them of that shit real quick. “Alright, new squadron. We’re all blooded master pilots, we’re all here because we’ve now gotten to the point where adrenaline is our personal heroin. So, now that we’re done practicing signature maneuvers and learning from each other, at least for now, we have orders. There’s a Keldebriar squadron hitting Terran Republic outposts in raids, hit and run shit, and intelligence has a good idea of where they’re going to be hitting next. Our mission is to intercept and destroy the raiders.”

That was well received. After so long hearing about how badass the Keldebriar pilots were and how fast and deadly their Talon fighters were, and so long having no better targets than fucking Sclunter pirates, it was good to have a real challenge. Callie couldn’t help but grin as she realized that the new squadron was every bit as dangerously insane as she and Jake. “Alright, your nav computers have the co-ordinates. Let’s rock.”

As the squadron punched into FTL, Callie slaved the sound systems to start blaring the Squadron’s proper anthem, letting it excite her as she always did. New opponents, new challenges, back in the cockpit…she and Jake had been lying to themselves, peace wasn’t for them.

Flying was. Being the best fucking starfighter pilots in the galaxy…no, the fucking universe…that was their thing.

Dropping out of hyperspace, they took position in places that the Keldebriar attack’s sensors wouldn’t pick up until it was far, far too late.

The Talons were clear on the viewscreen. Their name obviously came from their design, so reminiscent of a grasping claw. Callie could hear Jake smiling as shouted into the comms.

“Tiger Squadron, FANGS OUT!”

The weapons systems engaged and we were able to try out the new shit. The Talon fighters were fast, faster, even, than Tiger Squadron, and their pilots were excellent, and it was only the fact that the squadron had come in at six different angles, very suddenly, that forced the Keldebriar pilots to retreat as their opening strike was cut apart.

“Fucking oath! I was hoping they’d go a bit longer, but damn if that wasn’t a good skirmish. Casualties?”

“We lost fifteen, they lost a little more than thirty. Don’t think that’d be enough for them to – FANGS OUT!” 

The Talon craft had come back and were now slashing, brutally, through Tiger Squadron’s formations, each Saber spinning off for its own duel against a Talon. Callie swore as she was forced to match against one of them. Spirals were useless, corkscrews weren’t much better, but it wasn’t correcting to lead her, it was simply moving and correcting faster than…

“Oh, son of a bitch. Squadron, take heavy evasive maneuvers, maximize sublight speed, try to stay at a distance from them.” Callie wasn’t totally sure that this was that great an idea, and if it failed the squadron was going to get completely wiped, but if they didn’t shake it up a bit the Keldebriar were going to crush them.

Six more tiger-painted Sabers burned as plasma, coherent light, mass driver rounds and missiles sped back and forth between ships moving nearly as fast. Only two more Talons came apart. The skirmish went strong for a few more minutes, each feeling like a lesser eternity to Jake and Callie as they fought, desperately, against the fast, merciless predators before the Keldebriar squadron withdrew, quickly and in easy formation. 

“Alright, sound off.”

Total losses for Tiger Squadron came to ten percent of their force, which was NOT a great record for any squadron. Total losses for the Keldebriar unit came out to a little worse. “Okay, what the fuck happened there? We need to talk about this. Those losses were NOT within our usual standards.”

“Jake, that isn’t a bad question, but right now we’ve won. We need to send in reports, and we need to have the station recover one of the Talons that wasn’t completely totaled. I want a Palnt to look it over and tell us what the specs are, see if we can spot a weakness. Those fuckers were good. For that matter I’d like to look at some images of the Keldebriar when we get back to base, see what we can learn about them. The pilots have to have a weakness we test against too, and pretty clearly reaction times aren’t it.”

Jake grunted. “10-4, LT. Tiger Squadron, get to base. We’re not done yet. Next time we go up against Keldebriar, we are damn well going to do better than this, clear?”

A few mumbles. “THIS SQUADRON ARE THE BEST GODDAMN PILOTS FROM FUCKING TERRA, SOUND OFF LIKE YOU KNOW IT!” Jake roared into the comms as I smirked a bit. Tiger Squadron was NOT going to be a unit that fucking mumbled after a battle.

“Yes sir!”

“Better. Dock with the station, we have a debrief to attend.”


	6. United in Compassion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Namna meets a new recruit

Namna looked her new rescue specialist up and down for a moment, as he stood, quietly, in the crisp grey uniform of the Terran Republic Services. Corporal Akio Shen, son of Captain Ryuji Shen, the deceased commander of the Rhino Tank Company. Enlisted once he came of age to serve the galaxy as his father once had, to carry on the family tradition.

“Well, Corporal, congratulations. You’re losing your old rank and getting one from the Aid Corps. Welcome to the crew. It’ll be an honor to have someone of your family with me.”

“Thank you ma’am, for your kind words and respect to my family. It means a lot coming from one of your clan.”

“Of course.” It was interesting, even after fully uniting humans seemed to have so many different sub-traditions. Coming from a human of what they called “the East” of their world, a remark about bloodlines meant a lot more. She continued speaking, “Hop aboard the ship, Rescue Specialist. There’s apparently a derelict ship in the Dantorin system. Crippled by comet impact, apparently. No pirates involved, or they’d be sending a corvette with a marine boarding party. Our mission is to get aboard the ship and provide rescue and aid to any survivors.” The young man saluted as he stepped aboard Namna’s ship, christened, AFSS Always Hope.

The young Shen spoke with Namna en route. Most of the beings aboard the ship were Nathians, but here and there he could see Palnt or humans, and in the medical wing, he saw a Galri, growing clean tissue to be grafted onto anything that needed it.

Namna’s voice came in over the intercom. “Alright, aid corps workers. Strap in. Launching in thirty standard seconds.”

Namna chittered excitedly. Was this what Jake and Callie felt? It was awesome, if so. She understood why they were so addicted to it. Soaring through space, she decided to ask Shen a bit more about himself. “So, your father was Captain Shen of the Rhino Tanks, right?”

“Yeah, he designed those monsters himself. But his version was a prototype. Now they’re classed as super heavy ground vehicles and deploy as a component of normal armies. It’s okay, though. Growing up he always talked about the importance of protecting others who needed it, said it was the duty of a man.” Shen paused, and Namna waited. “Well, human, really. I never liked being a soldier much. Hated killing, even when it was necessary. So when the opportunity came to transfer to Aid Corps…”

“You jumped at it. I had a similar story. My siblings…well, you know, Tiger Squadron. They protected our entire people against the Vulpexi, and I felt like I had to do my part. Still, I’m not much of a warrior, and most Nathian fighters wouldn’t be able to take a sufficiently angry human teenager with comparable equipment, so I came up with the idea of Aid Corps, and it sort of…spread, through our people. Transporting goods, aid, building connections with others, like the Ivari, but as a new family of the stars instead of…well, a more…” She borrowed a human term, neither her native tongue nor Galick had an equivalent, “paternalistic view of every other race in the galaxy as little more than pups.”

Shen nodded. “Remind me of the old British, some days.”

“British…Commander Hendrix’s clan?”

“No…yes…but as they were far, far before we figured out FTL. They ruled a lot of the world and saw just about every other human culture as childish in comparison. At least the Ivari didn’t come with weapons.”

Namna paused. “Your race’s history is a rough one, but I’m glad you stopped fighting one another. We’ll be there in less than three standard minutes, this ship has some, as Jake and Callie would say, Giddyup.”

Shen laughed, then stopped as the Always Hope dropped out of n-space and saw the derelict. Hull breach, fairly bad. He threw on a space suit, as did Namna and the other medics and rescue specialists as the pilot drew closer. He was the first through the airlock and sprinting into the damaged hulk. There were a few bodies here and there, mostly ones torn asunder by the vacuum of space, but most of the civvies had put on exopacks, the quick-deploying, temporary space suits one used to survive a hull breach in space. 

That said, most of them had also injected Hyperzine, an emergency sedative made by the Nathians precisely for events like this. It created a temporary state of stasis so as to tax an exopacks life support system as little as possible, and even with that they were likely to have run out of time, thirty minutes in N-space translated to a few hours in normal, and exopacks were only good for three.

He hoisted the different beings up and carried them to the Aid Corps ship, passing them off to the Medics, like Namna, who stripped them out of the suits and began pumping oxygen into their lungs quickly. A few of them had suffered some injury when the frigidity of space flash-froze blood or tore away flesh, but the Galri could grow fresh tissue and blood from a handful of cells and perfectly integrate it, so they should be alright. 

Then a shudder took the derelict. He knew the type. It was something anyone who’d ever been in space dreaded. Reactor damage. Meltdown to follow. 

Moving as quickly as he could, and sweeping the ship wholly, he and the other specialists recovered two hundred and twenty three living passengers from a ship whose manifest said it carried three hundred and forty, keeping tally of the remains he found, and realizing that all passengers were accounted for, he swept the last two unconscious civilians onto his shoulders and sprinted back aboard the Always Hope, sealing the airlock as the last Aid Corps personnel and rescuees got aboard. “Launch, launch.” They were quickly underway, a safe distance from the soon-to-fail crystallic molecular distortion reactors.

Namna won his admiration, weaving back and forth between the bodies and teams, checking in on each, ensuring that every patient had what they needed to stay alive. Galri, Palnt, Nathians…even a few Epomi and Vulpexi had been aboard that ship. 

Namna spoke to him, when the last of the rescuees were in stable condition, and the last of the bodies had been identified. “Can I ask you something? Jake and Callie would have struggled with saving Vulpexi, but you didn’t have any issues with it.”

Shen paused. The Vulpexi had killed his father, but the Vulpexi Dominion had done that. The Consortium, which, now that Murdoch had been flushed out, seemed to be at least improving, had not. Besides…

“Something my father told me before he was killed. The cycle of revenge doesn’t help anyone. Chieftain-General Tiochnx of the Vulpexi Dominion’s Tyrsian army killed my father. Jaegar killed Tiochnx. And Tiochnx was following Dominion Grand Admiral Matras’s orders. Matras was killed by your adoptive brother and sister. Matras was fighting for the Dominion, which was forced to surrender and reform into something that is slowly getting better. Who, the fuck, would I seek vengeance against? And for that matter, what would my vengeance do but create more reason for the Consortium to stop improving?” 

Namna purr-chirped – a noise that terrestrial otters sometimes made, but never quite like that – approvingly and gave him a quick hug. “I feel the same. The only way forward is peace, and I’m glad there are humans who feel the same. Jake and Callie…I love them, and they are Nathian as much as human, but I don’t know if they feel the same way. I hope I get to introduce you to them at some point.”

Shen smiled. “It would be an honor to meet the founders of Tiger Squadron, for sure. And…to meet your brother and sister.”

Namna purr-chirped again. “Thank you for acknowledging it, by the way.”

“What?”

“That they’re Nathian, too. My people’s name for itself just means “family.” By being adopted to one of the clans, they are Nathian in a very real and sacred sense.”

Shen took a breath and thought about that. It explained why the Nathians planets, even their original homeworld, were so cosmopolitan. No one but Nathians could set foot upon their mother world, and they clung to that fiercely, but if Nathians considered any adopted into their clans as truly Nathian, a member of any species could live there.

“That’s sort of beautiful. Especially when I think about the implications.”

Namna grinned. “Yeah. Someday, if you grow weary of living among humans, and continue proving yourself like you did today, I’d be honored to have you join my clan as a brother.”

Shen took her paw in his hands. “I’d be honored, Captain. And I’d like to show you my homeland someday, too.”

“That sounds wonderful.” She paused, memories of Kiasa coming to mind. The Galri had, after recovery, enlisted in Aid Corps, piloting a custom-grown coralglider. In the aftermath of that interaction Namna had insisted that Aid Corps personnel on her crews received basic psychological aid training. For now, psych training while the autopilot’s working. For ops like this our main job is to make them feel safe and let them know they’re going to recover and go home to their families. For anything involving wartime refugees or anyone who’s been a captive of the Sclunter, the job’s a bit more complicated…”


	7. Assembling a Crew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adisa puts together a team to hunt down Murdoch

The Telitroc station was a sleazy one. Adisa was fine with that. Lowlifes weren’t usually trained fighters, but she’d heard there was a Tenebrac mercenary here that she could hire. The Tenebrae were a strange, insular race that had been driven off of their original world, Tenebras, by the Vulpexi Dominion, but due to the elusive race’s skill at avoiding detection, the Dominion had let them vanish. The one she was looking for was a male named Shaed, a mercenary who was known for being able to get into just about any room, even ones hardened against magnetic lockpicks or similar methods, without ever being detected. Shaed was known to be hired for heist jobs in several places in the Federation and the Consortium. 

“Viper woman, I am here.” She blurred and whipped around with a knife as the voice had come from behind her, and the Tenebrac jumped. “Good reflexes, human. Most do not react so calmly.” She studied the being, having never seen one up close before. Tall – a little over two meters – and slender, with strange, smooth skin like a squid’s. Their features were rather cephalopodic as well, now that she thought about it, and as disgusting as she might have found it to be talking to a chameleon squid under normal circumstances – cephalopods had always bothered her – she made herself ask, “I’m looking to hire you for your talents. I’m hunting a renegade named Murdoch, and I’m willing to share the bounty with any crew that comes along. You interested?”

“What’s the pay?”

“The bounty is over sixty thousand standard credits, but I’m recruiting a few others, so you’re likely to wind up with about ten to twelve thousand of that. I have a budget for hiring, and am prepared to offer two thousand up front.”

Shaed considered, the strange tentacular objects that formed his mane of hair twitching, his skin pulsing and changing color rapidly, and then bowed. “Very well, you have the services of Shaed. I will seek more information about the target for you. Assemble the rest of the crew as quickly as you can. I assume you have a ship that we will be using?”

Adisa nodded. The Cobra was in a hidden hangar not far away. “There are two humans aboard. I need a good stealth pilot, and a bit of non-human muscle to look a little more like a common mercenary crew, and a good code slicer to get into enemy computers. I have a Vulpexi friend who gave me the name of a code slicer from his phile, any ideas for the muscle or the pilot?

“There’s an Ivari, Ritia, who worked as a smuggler for a while.”

“What was she smuggling? I know renegade Ivari sometimes trade in certain…”

“She wasn’t trading weapons or dangerous minerals, just Euphozine.” The drug, a variant on the Hyperzine sedative, was highly illegal in both Federation and Alliance space, but in the mostly unregulated Consortium space it was tradeable with certain licenses. It had genuine medicinal uses as a painkiller but it was also a dangerous narcotic. Transporting it required licenses, and the medical community in none of the major spacefaring nation states bought Euphozine from unlicensed sellers. It was hardly the type of pilot she wanted but as she and the two Viper team members left with her still weren’t, strictly speaking, officially sanctioned in their hunt for Murdoch, she was going to have to get used to working with shady motherfuckers again. 

This Ritia might be helpful, even if Adisa winced at working with a drug trader, which she hadn’t done since before the invention of FTL. She still remembered the Angolan sprawl, and not fondly. “Alright. And for non-human muscle?”

“Worked with a Tyrsian named Andorix, a while back. Big fucker, good with a shredder and those brutal vibroswords his people’s warriors love so much. He’s great in a pinch and he’s a known mercenary. Lot of smugglers, code slicers, lotta shady people use his services when other criminals come down on them. He’s got an honor code, though. Won’t work for anyone who trades in slaves or sapient beings. He said he had enough of that when he was forced to work with the Dominion.”

Adisa smiled. “Alright, he’s a good pick. But our next stop is the Vulpexi. His name is Brimas Blorgi.”

Shaed laughed evilly, the hooked tentacles around his mouth turning the sound into something eerie, twisted. “You know how to pick them, Mamba. He did good work breaking down the Moti Cartel, only a few weeks back. Your former team did an excellent job bringing the hammer down.”

Adisa smiled. “I trained them well.” There was no point in hiding her pride. Everyone knew Viper team was still hers, even if only the team sniper and the team demolitions expert had come on this run. She handled CQC herself. “Alright, let’s get to the ship.”

The Viper was a small, sleek ship of combined Vulpexi, Ivari and Palnt engineering, totally illegal, commissioned before the incident on the New Path, from various seedy sources who were willing to keep it secret. It could carry Adisa, a small team and all their kit. Cpl. Doakes, the sharpshooter, and Specialist Owens, the demo expert, were already waiting. Neither of them looked super comfortable with the Tenebrac either, though in Doakes’ case this was due to a bad brush with a Tenebrac contract killer hired for payback and in the case of Owens it was a degree of xenophobia. Given that Owens had volunteered to go after Murdoch, a known human supremacist, Adisa had pulled his file. The man was trustworthy, and saw the xenophobia as something of a scar from his fucked-up childhood. Doakes’ nerves faded after only a split second, as long as Shaed didn’t sneak up on him he’d be find.

“Alright, next stop is a Vulpexi code slicer. Lest anyone complain, it’s a cousin of that little dork Endirmas.”

A chuckle from Doakes. “Blorgi phile Got it. Alright.”

Brimas was on the strange slings his people used for chairs, working at a terminal in a data-vault, one of the amazing digital libraries in an Ivari station. He was clearly cruising through a restricted file, completely undeterred by the codes. “Look at this. The Ambrin Confederacy had some weird contact with raiders. Not the Sclunter, no idea who would have done that. Not Tyrsians, either, there’s none anywhere near there, their ship beacons can’t be fully turned off.”

Adisa kept herself from chuckling at the hacker’s cheerful and easy hacking of classified data. He’d do.

The Ambrin Confederacy was extremely isolationist, three former Vulpexi slave races who’d returned to their homeworlds, which were all close together, then formed a nation-state as a group, away from the rest of the races. Militia-grade forces by human or Keldebriar standards for military, impressive levels of industrial capacity for three one-world races, but perhaps their greatest triumph was their trade and information networks. “Human raiders, maybe?”

“Maybe but there’s no human ships tracked to that zone and the Keldebriar…ah, renegade Keldebriar. Report just came through, renegade Keldebriar. The Keldebriar’s Council and Emperor apparently ordered the renegades executed by ion purge. As the ‘just penalty’ for breaking a law of Keldebriar warriors. Apparently two of them, as the victims were both civilians and had surrendered when the unit first attacked, but they were killed anyway.

Adisa winced. Death by ion purge, holy mother of fuck, that was an awful way to die, your body slowly turning to plasma. But it was good to know that the Keldebriar held honor so seriously. Honorable surrender was recognized, and attacks on civilians were absolutely forbidden. A painful death awaited any Keldebriar warrior who broke those codes.

“Alright, good to know. I have a job for you. You know about the terrorist on the New Path, right?”

“Yes, I know you were falsely accused, and that the real criminal in the scenario is a former officer of Terran Republic intelligence, named Murdoch Camitz, and I know what the bounty is. If you want my assistance finding him I’m willing to share bounty. You’ll have to kill him yourself, though, violence isn’t my specialty.”

Adisa nodded. Endirmas’s brother was just like him, in a way. Verbose, excited about knowledge, physically unimpressive as hell, but earnest. Andorix was easier to find, working in a fight pit on Tenebras. A hand-to-hand brawl, no holds barred, between two Tyrsians where others placed bets.

Andorix crushed his opponent, almost effortlessly. A throw and brutal strikes with both clenched fists and tail, the massive muscles sliding around beneath crimson scales before the other Tyrsian clawed a tiny wound in its own chest, and Andorix held a fist aloft in victory.

Adisa smiled and approached Andorix after the fight, after he’d collected his prize money. “I wanted to hire you for some work.”

“Name?”

She paused, then spoke, “Adisa Imari.”

“You killed a friend of mine, the guard on the new path.”

“He was trying to kill me.”

“I know. I know Murdoch set you both up. But…honor demands a fair battle between the two of us. I always wanted to try myself against the Mamba. Regardless of victor, we’ll go after the coward who set two worthy warriors against each other.”

Adisa grinned and took off her jacket and boots before stepping into the ring. Her jumpsuit remained on, as the Tyrsian acknowledged the right of human combatants in this arena to light, non-protective clothing. 

The Tyrisian’s tail was easy to dodge, roll around and drive her heel into his temple, before he swung a massive, literally-ham-sized fist into her gut and sent her sprawling. Before he had time to follow up she’d spun to her feet and kicked out one of her opponent’s backward facing knees, which buckled as she delivered a knee strike to his snout…and promptly took a tailstrike to the jaw.

A shin strike to the stomach and the Tyrsian doubled over, before lunging at her with a crushing grip. She managed to slither out, breath racing, and got him with a shoulder throw, coming out with him in a choke, keeping her body to close to his to strike against him, even trapping his tail near his ribs. He struggled for a moment, then popped a quick claw and made a tiny cut on his own chest, an honorable yield in a brawl between two warriors.

As she put her boots and jacket back on, and he slid back into his clothing, the crocodilian snout split in a brutal grin. “It will be an honor fighting alongside you to avenge our mutual friend, Mamba. Let’s go crush a spider.”


	8. A family man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaegar writes home

Maj. General Jaegar got the dispatch. Wolf Division was needed. Another Sclunter pirate group’s base had been discovered. The standard Tiger Squadron patrol to destroy the pirates’ orbital defenses and gunships had done their work and had now fallen back to docking at their carrier, the TRS Khan. The unit was still training to fight the Keldebriar but were available to deal with pirates as needed. 

Now, though, they’d done their duty. It was time for the marines of Wolf Division to do theirs. Jaegar was reading a Lens message from his 12-year-old daughter as the TRS Lupa II approached the base. 

_ Dear Dad, _

_ Thanks for asking about me. I know you have so much important stuff to do with your division, but I can’t wait for you to get an Earthside rotation. Dysphoria sucks. People are supportive, now, which makes it a bit easier but now that I’ve developed an allergy to the synthetic hormones I just feel so wrong. _

_ I do have good news, though. The science fair team won the continental finals, planetaries are next month. I’m with one of the best six science fair teams on EARTH. We win that we go to system wide finals! I’m so excited, Dad, I can’t sit still. Write back when you can, and stay safe, okay? What was it you told me? Getting shot stings, right? Come back safe. _

_-_ _Your daughter,_

_ Jessica _

Jaegar felt like his heart would break when he read that Jessie thought he had more important things to do with the division than her. It wasn’t true, of course, but he’d been a light year away from her for nine months now. Her birthday was coming up, and he had an idea for something he could give her. His personal space transport could move pretty quickly, and supposedly the Galri had a way to help with her problem. He felt himself tear up with pride when she mentioned her science project. He’d be on Earth in a few weeks for a few months, he’d be able to be at the planetary finals for her, and be able to take her to a Galri planet.

Sliding into his M167 assault armor and donning the helmet, readying the flachette pistol, vibrosaber, and plasma rifle, he stepped into the drop pod. “Marines, prepare to drop, eliminate all Sclunter and secure the base. The Aid Corps will be here pretty soon, I want the whole zone locked down for them when they arrive.”

Despite how little everyone respected them as enemies, the marauders were not to be underestimated. Sclunter were vicious, strong, had excellent reflexes, and had the instincts of hunters.

Jaegar grinned wolfishly as he sent two plasma bolts into one of them. What they didn’t have was decent armor-piercing gear, training, or discipline. The marines secured the base, ruthlessly mowing down the Sclunter. Despite the fact that leading from the front was usually more for squad or platoon leaders than Major Generals, Jaegar never intended to stop. He took point in every room, led the breaching of several rooms, soaked up a few rounds that caromed harmlessly off his armor. The base was fully swept and locked down with over twelve hundred pirates killed. His forces had lost only fourteen men, all who had gotten unlucky. 

“Only,” he thought, was a bullshit designation when talking about lives lost. Those men and women all had families back home, families who wouldn’t be getting their spouse, parent, child or sibling back but their body, wrapped in the flag of the Terran Republic.

A few of those taken prisoner by the Sclunter cried as the Aid Corps ship came down and started tending to them. It wasn’t the usual model, the more standard Charity-class medical transport but one of the Galri’s living ships. 

He saluted the Galri officer as xe approached, and the Galri saluted back as the mixed Aid Corps crew disembarked and began tending to the rescuees. 

“You remember me, Major General?”

Jaegar looked and shook his head, sadly. “I do not, sorry.”

“Aid Corps Captain Kaisa. You rescued me from a place like this back when you were a colonel with a regiment. An Aid Corps officer helped me recover and I decided to repay the favor.”

“Ah, glad you made it. Good to see you again.” The two of them dropped the salute. “Hey, just to confirm. Your people can do things with their own bodies, modify the genetics of others, right?”

“Yes, but it depends on what you want done.”

“My daughter…she was born with male anatomy and has a few medical conditions that make it impossible to correct that issue with human medicine. Is it true that your people could..?”

“Help her anatomy match her soul? Yes, though that isn’t my area. You’d have to go a Galri world, but yes, that’s doable.” Jaegar grinned and thanked Kaisa. “Thank you. Hopefully we see each other again.”

“Of course.” 

Jaegar collected his forces and aided them in the salvage of the Sclunter’s ammunition. The budget had finally been corrected, but there was no reason not to keep carrying surplus that Logistics didn’t know about, in case they were ever out in the field longer than they were supposed to be. Sclunter flachettes were compatible with Wolf Division’s sidearms and the power cells could be altered slightly to be compatible with their plasma weaponry. 

Those fourteen Marines who had died had expended their lives to buy back the lives of four hundred prisoners now being cared for by Aid Corps, and enough ammunition to take two bases just like this one.

He sat down at his computer and wrote the letters to the families of the fallen, sincerely pouring out regret for those who had died, and offering his comfort to the families they left behind. Then he turned to write a letter back to Jessie and to his ex-wife.

_ Dear Jessie, _

_ Nothing is more important than you to me. Nothing. And I have some good news for you. I will be rotating back Earthside in time to see you go to planetary finals. And I have a present for you, if you’re up for a hyperlane trip to the Galri. Dysphoria sucks, and as it happens, they have a way to fix it, a way that won’t cause you any trouble. I love you and I can’t wait to see you. _

_-_ _Your dad_

_ Hann _

Before sending the letter, he sent another to his ex-wife, telling her about his idea for their daughter. The divorce had been amicable, they had just rushed and married younger than they should have before realizing they were simply incompatible long-term. They had joint custody of Jessie and worked well as a team to take care of her, the one thing they made a truly excellent team at. 

His wife’s message came back almost immediately that Jessie would be so happy to hear that her dad was coming home and that the Galri were willing to help. “It’s that kind of heart that makes me sorry we didn’t work out as a couple, and the kind of thing that makes us work fine as friends. Go on, tell her.”

Jaegar sent the message to his daughter, and smiled when he got the reply.


	9. Last Stand of the Synthor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiloh Hendrix fights the last of the Synthor.

Commander Shiloh Hendrix was increasingly frustrated with the Synthor. Lion Fleet was stuck as a detachment of Fourth Armada while the omnicidal machines were being dealt with, and they were always learning. 

At Porcyon, she’d stopped their point defense with brutally focused energy weapons fire.

At Antares, she’d gotten through their improved shields with scattered kinetic weapons fire, such that the deflection angles mauled their own defenses. 

Each time, the core had been destroyed, with minimal losses. One thing she’d figured out was that despite the Synthor’s rapidly improving defense, their offense rarely improved, as their goal was self-preservation and forcing others to join them in synthetic transformation. Hendrix was simply getting frustrated with the ongoing fighting against an enemy that refused to go away. She’d even been communicating with Keldebriar leadership, who held to it that no matter what it might mean for the Alliance vs. Federation war, all warriors could and should share advice for overcoming a mutual, genocidal enemy like the Kyriion slinging Synthor.

Now, attacking four of their Nexus Ships at once, one of the vast machines that controlled large numbers of the mechanical horrors, Shiloh sincerely hoped she was about to finally crush them. They’d been tracking the quadruple-ping of the Synthor detection systems for quite some time. The last four anywhere in Allied, Federation, Consortium, or Ambrin Confederacy space. 

“Synthor forces coming into view on targeting computers, plotting firing solutions.”

“Excellent. Fire mass drivers and plasma bolts to see what happens, see what defenses they’ve got going this time.”

The weapons fire streaked towards the target, stopping against the flash of shields and the nigh-impenetrable armor. Shiloh cursed, quietly, knowing her torpedoes were likely to be the only things that could simultaneously clear their shields and breach their armor but were likely to be taken apart by their point defense. And that wasn’t accounting for the Synthor’s other ships, swarming in computer-calculated co-ordination around the Nexus ships. 

The enemy ships launched a barrage at Lion Fleet, “Forward shields, now.”

Enemy fire skated off, as it had the last few times. The standard ships didn’t have quite as easy a time, but Lion Fleet…

“My flagship is called the Nemean for a reason, you mechanoid freaks. ” A bridge officer snickered at the Commander’s bitching. “Missile Frigates, get into the mass shadow of that star, and hold fire, I don’t want you firing until I say so. Armada frigates, you too, this is going to take more than just Lion Fleet. Don’t let them catch you. Once there, plot firing solutions on Target Alpha.”

“Destroyers, cruisers, slam as much fire into their massed forces and try to thin them out, preferably interrupter fire to scramble them interspersed with electrostatic shredding charges to rip them apart. Fast and hard as you can, I want that threat thinned out as well as I can get it.” 

Her forces, and those of the Armada, began carrying out the orders, a handful of the cruisers began getting swarmed by the full force of Synthor fighters and corvettes, which had the wits to deploy EMP mines to slow the fucking things down, now that they had way too good an idea of how to evade human point defense. 

The electromagnetic pulse bombs and their magnetic triggers functioned to paralyze the Synthor fighters, but infuriatingly, they had managed to halt themselves before coming into range of human point defense detection systems, forcing human gunners to preform extremely risky manual fire to mow them down in the six seconds they’d have before the Synthor’s systems rebooted. 

Hendrix hoped they’d manage more than the usual third of them, but for the present she had other targets to worry about, her battleships and dreadnaughts were ordered to focus all non-torpedo fire on Target Bravo, force its processors to split their attention as much as possible on running point defense, shielding and the reactive armor to limit their control of the other Synthor forces.

The 4th Armada was doing something far, far simpler with its more mainline ships, no clever tricks that the Synthor could adapt to. They simply fired everything, concentrating on Target Charlie and waited to grind the fucking thing down, keeping their own shields and fighters deployed to attempt to drive off of the enemy fighters.

“Corvettes, corkscrew peregrine maneuver to crush the enemy corvettes, we’ve never used that one against them before and we need to clear those out, then do some evasive maneuver against Alpha target, keep their point defense and fire on you, I want to try something, just evade them long enough.” 

Her corvettes weren’t ideally evasive, but as she didn’t have Tiger Squadron on hand, and they were good enough that they were only likely to take glancing hits that their shields and armor could take. The corvettes streaked across the void and blasted through the enemy forces, then began weaving complicated paths through the firing zones of the major Synthor ships of the Alpha Nexus ship, and Shiloh smiled as she gave the missile frigates their long-awaited order. “Fire on Alpha Nexus.”

Thousands of antimatter torpedoes screamed towards their target, of which about half were still halted by point defense, but the rest slammed home, tearing into the armor of the first of the three major objectives, tearing off large sections and eventually tearing apart the ship. 

The shock of the controlling core of a third of the Synthor fleet suddenly vanishing left a number of major targets opened as they desperately reconfigured for independent operation, too slowly.

“All available units, neutralize disabled Synthor ships before they recover.” She was still left in a bit of trouble. That trick wasn’t going to work twice, just like everything else they’d done to the Synthor, the bastards would adapt.

Hendrix had a few other ideas though. The enemy point defense was designed to stop missiles and torpedoes, synched to the very guiding chips that those weapons used to track their targets at…she remembered some tricks Tiger Squadron had pulled, then grinned evilly. 

“Dreadnaughts, Battleships, cruisers, I want to try something. Fire all torpedoes on simple projectile trajectory against Bravo Nexus, absolutely no tracking chips should be active, I want to see something. Destroyers, corvettes, get in position to handle whatever falls off once that goes down.

Fourth Armada’s heavy ships were making progress against Charlie Nexus, and the torpedoes of her own heavier ships got through Bravo Nexus’s defenses, tearing in and slowly crushing it. Her corvettes and destroyers ripped into that section of the Synthor fleet. 

It was of course, that moment, that the Delta Nexus appeared and started ripping through 4th Armada, and Hendrix swore. “Fuck, Nemean, prepare for inertial compensation overload, come about and lend fire support to 4th Armada. “Destroyers, corvettes, start coming about and suppressing them. Frigates, lend your weight to their fire.”

She knew it was likely too late. The Synthor were capable and ruthless, they’d come in at an advantage and the 4th Armada was likely hosed. Lion Fleet still had the motto. Not one left behind. Her first step as the rotation almost threw her to the deck, ordered hell unleashed to finish off the Charlie Nexus and give the 4th Armada a little bit of breathing room, finally ripping it apart, and with that, 4th Armada pulled back a bit, throwing mines between them and the Synthor’s pursuit, which didn’t work half so effectively as the Synthor had already seen that trick, but the enemy’s counter to it took enough time for the 4th Armada to pull back beneath a curtain of protective fire, albeit with roughly 20% of its total forces destroyed. 

The Synthor began redeploying in a way she’d never quite seen before, and she smiled as she issued what was doubtlessly the most stupid order she’d ever given. The missile frigates were cut off from her by a Synthor dreadnaught, and if she could break it, it would leave the final Nexus exposed. Direct fire with unguided torps would probably be stopped by the Synthor’s rapidly adapting shielding AI. Guided torps directed at them certainly would. Guided missiles aimed at their enemies wouldn’t be stopped. Otherwise, enemy missiles would be stopped by their own point defense.

“Missile Frigate contingent, target the Nemean and fire. Don’t question, just do it before they figure out what I’m doing.”

Bless their hearts, her captains knew to obey her, no matter how batshit insane they were, trusting absolutely in the commander who’d led them in a merciless war of increasingly deranged gimmicks against a genocidal foe. 

The missiles tore through the dreadnaught, and Hendrix ordered a barrage against the last surviving fleet as the enemy Nexus moved them in a defensive series of maneuvers that kept them from being annihilated.

Cursing herself for using the most insane thing she could think of against a non-Nexus target, Hendrix began wracking her brain for other solutions against these mad machines, begging it to work with her one more time, flinging massive kinetic weapons, plasma blasts and brutal EMP blasts across the vast stretch of void between the two fleets, all the while ordering her own fleets into evasive maneuvers, aided by the fire of the battered but still very alive 4th Armada. One more trick from Tiger Squadron. 

“Alright, all other units, hold as much fire as you can along a 45 by 72 degree line from the Nemean to the Delta Nexus. I’m about to do something incredibly stupid.” She laughed madly as she issued an order, one more mad reference from an older book, one she’d enjoyed reading in the old archives.

“The enemy’s gate is down, get closer and fire everything we’ve got in the gap, all power to shields, NOW!”

Closing the distance was insane. The rest of the fleet held a gap open but for several minutes there was nothing but fire flashing off the shields before her navigator gave the signal that they were in position and she screamed the order, knowing they were inside enemy point defense. “FIRE EVERYTHING!”

Moments later, the most harrowing six minutes of Hendrix’s life, the last Nexus of the Synthor fell. The other fleets mopped up and Commander Hendrix leaned back in her command chair. 

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is how we do things in Lion Fleet. No mercy, clever tricks, and a LOT of thrashed genocidal maniacs. Well done everyone.”


	10. Called Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake and Callie are brought to account for their reckless bullshit

“Alright, time to pay the cougars back.” The term was catching on for the Keldebriar for their biological similarity to the large cats. The Keldebriar’s biological information was interesting. They were still capable of fully running on all fours, and like the great cats of earth, they were evolved to hunt as ambush and sprint pursuit predators. 

“Remember everyone,” Callie continued into the comms, as they prepared to spring the ambush. “The Keldebriar evolved for perfect, precise reflexes and ambush. Everything we usually do is going to work badly against them. Their reflexes are better than ours. Get me? Does not matter how fast you are, they’re faster. You get in close against them and go reflex vs. reflex, they are going to own your ass. Stay at a distance, scramble them with the first maneuver, then pull back and make them chase you. The longer we can avoid and evade, the more we can keep them on defense for the first few minutes, the lower our losses will be before they get tired and we can start tearing into them when they’re worn out from the initial shock. Their Talon fighter is made for maneuver and high firepower, not taking hits. Jake, you know the order.” 

The Keldebriar Talons were coming into view on the targeting screens and the squadron was already beginning to activate their weapons systems. “Tiger Squadron, FANGS OUT!”

The Keldebriar formation reacted quickly to a small number of them being blown apart and replied by getting in pursuit to the passing fighter wave far faster than anticipated. Jake and Callie had personally been in the first wave, along with the best pilots in the squadron of Terra’s best. The next wave pounced on the Keldebriar’s reaction, scything more from behind, forcing the feline pilots to break off and engage on multiple fronts. With the initial shock worn off, the speed and talent of the Keldebriar began telling. 

Callie was furious. Regardless of her own massive skill as a pilot, the Keldebriar behind her kept up a torrent of fire that it was pushing her to the absolute brink to evade. The damn cats were fast and excellent and it was going to take a lot to beat them. The Vulpexi’s Dominion Bladeshell had outspecced the Terran Saber to a degree that had been ridiculous but they’d been no match for human pilots.

The Keldebriar Talon fighter had about the same specs as a Saber and the best pilots in the Republic were struggling to match them. She knew full well she’d be in trouble if not for the shields, and it looked like another thirty Tiger Squadron pilots had gotten vaped in the time gap. 

“Fuckers are good. Jake, get this one off my tail –“ 

Her boyfriend – no, husband, she thought with a completely out of place glee – swept down from above and blasted her pursuer, just as she cranked up and passed within six meters of his wingtip and blasted his own pursuer. “Take them on!”

The Squadron raced in, again and again as the Keldebriar’s skill and reflexes continued to take their tolls on Tiger Squadron, but the Keldebriar finally grew weary, after Tiger Squadron had lost perhaps a third of its total manning, the Keldebriar had only lost fifteen percent. 

But now there was a difference. The enemy had grown sluggish. Slow, weak. Less fast than they once were.

And now it was time to remind the Keldebriar that Tigers still reigned supreme among fighting cats. The multiple wings of the Squadron blazed in from all sides, tearing the Talon craft apart, delivering scores of casualties in a matter of minutes, kinetic, plasma and energy weapons blasting in, the Keldebriar reactions slowing, their fire now easily avoided, their targeting too lackluster for them to get a bead on human targets still fighting at their peak. 

Callie started laughing. The enemy could do a lot of damage, but the Keldebriar were all about shock and awe. They’d evolved for the predatory equivalent of it, and their bodies had changed little over the millennia, just as humans had not. The enemy were likely to be fast and agile in a way humans would never be. But just as Jaegar had proven that human endurance outmatched Tyrsian strength in ground combat, they could prove that the same was said against Keldebriar speed.

“Alright, we know how to beat them. If we survive their first attacks they get too tired to operate effectively quickly and you can slaughter them wholesale. FANGS OUT AND SHOW NO MERCY!”

The Keldebriar eventually jumped back to warp, moving sluggish and slow compared to how lethal they’d been in the opening hour of the battle, but they left over three hundred destroyed Talon craft behind them. 

Callie and Jake laughed into the comms as the Keldebriar fled, only to hear from another flight leader in the squadron. “Lieutenant, Ensign. We lost sixty three people today. We lost just under a third of our total manning. This is a pretty serious moment.” The younger pilot, whoever it was, sounded angry, and for a moment Jake and Callie were struck by it. They didn’t know this young woman’s name. And what’s more, they had just been laughing when they lost that many people. As they docked, they both felt sick.

“What happened to us? We used to…” They were heaving away from the rest of the squadron, and slowly came to a conclusion. “Alright. We need to go talk to the squadron. Get them together, learn their names properly. We’ve been shitty officers, Jake. We haven’t been getting as attached to the troops as we should.” 

Jake shook his head. “We lost so many today. I…after our last squadron, our parents, do we really want to go around getting attached? I think…it’d be better if we…”

“We’re human. It’s one of the things that made us strong. It’s why we were allowed to become Nathian, as well. I don’t care how scary it is if we can’t care about our squadron mates we don’t deserve to be in command. Doesn’t matter how good we’ve gotten at piloting. We need to honor the dead, talk out what’s happened and get to know the pilots under us…”

Jake finished, “And then get a good Aid Corps shrink assigned to the station because goddamnit we apparently need one. We’re really getting screwed up here, if battle like that became funny.”

I nodded, grimly and we stepped out of the officer’s quarters to make the announcement. “Pilots of Tiger Squadron,” I began, a lump in my throat. “I apologize for the distance and insensitivity of your officers – our distance and insensitivity, that is – and I hereby give you our full apologies and desire to make amends. We will be contacting the Aid Corps and requesting the placement of a psychological aid officer on the carrier in order to deal with the issues that have resulted in our grotesque failure to preform our duties as officers.”

We saluted our spaces, and awaited their reply. The first to reply was a young woman, who introduced herself Petty Officer Amelia Minas, whose voice they recognized from the comms. “With respect, Ma’am, Sir. That’s better. Now, permission to speak candidly?”

Jake and I nodded. “We…the squadron…know you two haven’t exactly been right since your last squadron got wiped out but yeah, do better. And figure out how to beat the damn Keldebriar, they’re owning our asses. Ma’am, sir.”

We dropped our salutes as she did, then Jake spoke. “Petty Officer Third Class, Amelia Minas, fall out.”

She did so, looking nervous and Jake and I spoke in unison. “For your skill in reminding your officers of their duty and speaking on behalf of your squadron mates, as well as for initiative, you are hereby promoted to Chief Petty Officer of Tiger Squadron.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You’re now the most highly ranked non-commissioned officer of the unit. You’ll get the pips soon enough, and get the promotions that come with them. In the meanwhile, we need to get to know the new squadron. Recover the bodies, then get to the mess. We’ll have a wake and start moving forward.”


	11. A Clue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adisa's crew draw closer to murdoch

Doakes was preforming maintenance on his precision Gauss rifle, and Adisa was tinkering with her special operations issue shredder submachinegun. Owens was busy building a few dozen powerful explosives. “Shaed, do you have any information about where Murdoch might have gone?”

“No, Viper. I mostly work in in-person espionage or theft and smuggling. I would not be the expert on where that one went. Other Tenebrae were hired to find him, but disappeared.” He paused, then added, in a deadpan tone. “Not in the way I am accustomed to doing so either. Were murdered. He is quite good at keeping others off his tail. Even Tenebrae cannot always stay hidden.”

Adisa nodded, wearily, as Doakes muttered and Owens continued to tinker. “He needs to be somewhere where a human would raise little notice, and not in Alliance Space, since he’s the most wanted terrorist in those sectors at present.”

“Nor in Federation space, since several of their heads of state almost died on the New Path. But federation space has few humans, these days.” Brimas was relaxed as he threw that bit of information out there, still slicing into code to try to find what information he could. “And the Vulpexi Free Economic Zones?”

Andionx shook his mighty head. “Not among my people. We have little forgiveness for skulking cowards. And yours?” He looked at Brimas, who rippled.

“Among Consortium lords, maybe. Among common Vulpexi, not a chance. Many resent humans, and many others have no desire to risk retribution by them. None but the most powerful would harbor him and none of them have any humans staying in any of their residences. I have access to their home security systems.”

Adisa smiled at that, it was good information. “Alright, so where does that leave us? Crime zones like Tenebras, or maybe the Ambrin Confederacy.”

“Ambrin only trade with outsiders at their borders, and don’t allow others into their system. He might have been able to slip in, but I doubt it. They have good alarm systems for such things.” Shaed spoke. “He’s not likely to be on Tenebras again, either. We have quite a rumor mill. If he was there, might not know where on Tenebras, but I would know that he was there. Or,” Shaed acknowledged, “Perhaps not. The rumor mill at the moment is obsessed with a massive heist of proscribed material that took place. The robbers were human, it seemed, but using proper military tactics. Would you know anything about this?”

Adisa looked at him. “No. What was stolen?”

“Schematics of some superweapon they never bothered building. And something else, too. Genome schema, instructions for Nano construction vats.”

“What does that mean?”

Shaed whispered. “It means that whoever stole it can grow a small army with the right materials.” Adisa paused. “Isn’t cloning grotesquely illegal pretty much everywhere, including the Consortium?”

Brimas nodded. “Yes. Slavery, cloning, and in the aftermath of meeting the Synthor, mechanical beings are now forbidden as well. But those materials were not destroyed, indicating someone was planning something illegal anyway. And now it’s in the hands of people not terribly into law as a concept. A lot of crime groups would be happy to have grown laborers to sell or grown enforcers.”

Owens spat. “You seem remarkably calm about that thought, Vulpexi. Miss the Dominion?” He paused, looking sick, and Brimas rippled. “Not quite. The Blorg phile was never well loved by the dominion higher ups, but old education has a way of sticking with you. Trying to train myself out of it. I apologize for any-“

Owens nodded. “I understand old conditioning. Grew up in a compound with a bunch of wannabe anti-xeno terrorists.”

“Anti-xeno?” Shaed’s interest was piqued. Doakes answered, “Humans who want to destroy or conquer non-human life and think it was a mistake to be friendly with the other species of the galaxy.”

“Understood. And are such terrorists common? Such sentiments?” The Tenebrac’s carriage was…wary?

“Not terribly, though there was a small upswing of that during the Kyriion crisis. We’ve kept a close monitor on most of them.” Owens blushed, ashamed. “Trying to unlearn it. So when my service term came up, I got into demolitions to try to use the explosives tricks they taught me to protect all sapient life. Try to do the right thing with it, you know?” The Tyrsian nodded, and muttered, “honorable.”

Adisa refocused on the situation. Murdoch had some connections to xenopurge circles, had actually been a mole among them for a while before apparently starting to sympathize, and he would be the type to train them in military tactics if it became convenient to allow him to get his hands on serious support. 

Those materials might not have been his, but an all-human robber crew might have some connections with those circles, so if they were captured and apprehended, they might disclose information about Murdoch’s location. 

“Brimas, track anything you can, official or unofficial, about that. Ritia, Shaed, Andonix, get in contact with your smuggling contacts, I’ll contact a few of mine, and we’ll try to see where the material went. If we can get that information, we might just have a lead. Even if we can’t, whatever we stir up looking might give us something.”

Adisa couldn’t place it but this sort of thing seemed like what Murdoch would go in for. Grabbing up something like that then vanishing to parts unknown to make the most of them. 

A few weeks of work later, Shaed and Ritia had returned with useful news. The material had been stolen and transported surreptitiously to a small world called Rietarch, where it had been purchased by some group of humans. Adisa, Doakes and Owens swapped incredulous looks. Rietarch had been declared lost to Kyriion after multiple reports of outbreaks and Synthor attacks, and reinforcements appearing had found the planet dark and cities uninhabited, scans showing it lifeless. It was possible there were unknown facilities not scanned for, like the black sites recently dismantled on Tenebras, but it wasn’t likely. No sapient life had inhabited that world prior to human colonization, so any black sites there would have been human built.

And if Murdoch had been stationed there prior to the outbreak…

He’d be the type to order people into a safe zone to wait out the plague to get a loyal following, even if it meant compromising security. That wouldn’t be wrong on its own, but he’d use it to elevate himself and become a ruler.

Maybe they were looking in the wrong place. But Brimas, when asked, confirmed that Murdoch had been stationed there during the crisis, and Ritia’s own record confirmed that it had quite the black market going.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have an AO.”


	12. Tiger's Den

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake and Callie improve. Also, can you tell that the irregular nature of Tiger Squadron has led to a remarkable lack of enforcement regarding fraternizing?

Kaisa had volunteered for the mission. The founders of Tiger Squadron had requested psychological help from Aid Corps. Captain Namna had gotten the request but had, due to ethics rules, been unable to go to herself. So the Nathian officer had put out a request for psych-certified volunteers. Kaisa had been eager to volunteer. Jake and Callie mattered to the person who had been xer biggest inspiration, and it would be an honor to help them. As Kaisa had been taken off the rescue unit by virtue of realizing that xer calling was more in rehabilitation of prisoners or refugees, it was well within xer MoS, as the humans called it.

Xe had been dispatched, and flew her coral glider to the Khan, the custom carrier of Tiger Squadron. Leaving it, xe reported to the squadron’s personnel office and volunteered. “Aid Corps Psychological Officer Kaisa Telias, reporting for duty as requested.”

The non-commissioned officer smiled. “Chief Petty Officer Amelia Minas, Tiger Squadron. Welcome aboard, Kaisa. The LT and Ensign are leading Delta and Bravo sections of the squadron in some practice maneuvers right now. When they get back I’ll make sure to send them to you. In the meantime, we don’t have any organic quarters, I’m afraid, but we do, in honor of Galri visitors, have a wing of the third deck where the squadron does some gardening. Morale and fresh vegetables for the mess.”

Kaisa bowed and nodded. “Thank you, that will do very nicely.”

**

Kaisa had been working with Tiger Squadron for a few weeks now. Currently, it was Jake’s turn to meet with xer. Callie was out conducting training exercise, as he had during her session yesterday. 

The therapy was going well, though losses continued to mount against the Keldebriar, more and more of the squadron required it. Humanity’s elite pilots, drawn from every other squadron of every other Armada, were carrying the brunt of the conflict with the Keldebriar, who were continuing to prove equals to them. All the same, the mighty cats were learning respect for their human opponents. 

Jake and Callie had been hit hard by the deaths of late. At almost fifty percent turn over in six months, Tiger squadron was looking at the worst loss rate it had had in over a decade. Kaisa was still talking to him, asking questions.

“So you have some form of identity crisis, as well?”

“Yes. Nathian and human, and even though both of them hold pack bonding pretty sacred, I can’t bring myself to with most people anymore. Callie and Namna are the only ones who haven’t died on me.”

“And you believe that everyone will?”

“Not exactly but this is Tiger Squadron. The missions we get are all but impossible and as a result a lot of us die. I don’t want to keep letting people get close to lose them.”

Kaisa paused, xer three eyes blinking in sequence, then dipped xer head. “You have been a soldier for over half your life, and all of that has been as the second in command of an elite squadron that gets sent on the most dangerous missions. I understand that such a position leads to high risks and high losses. Despite your Nathian upbringing, you have the human urge to bond and to fight, but also to protect yourself. That’s understandable. But it’s worth it to remember that those who follow you all have those they love, as well.”

***

Callie’s turn talking to Kaisa came the next day, as Jake drilled the squadron in counter-corvette and counter-cruiser maneuvers, keeping discipline tighter while speaking to the squadron as they dismounted. Her fears were addressed as well, her issues with getting closer to the Squadron at large. 

“So to your mind, Lieutenant, you know you need to engage with the others, but you still hesitate because of fear? You don’t seem the type to be motivated by fear very often. From my species’ perspective, you engage pretty recklessly in high risk activity.”

“That’s the job. And I’m one of the best star pilots in the galaxy.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be leading them, and doesn’t that require knowing them?” Kaisa was growing frustrated with the two of them. They were so good at fearing for everyone else, fearing for their hearts, but seemed to have no fear for themselves. For that matter, the two officers xe’d been talking to seemed to be deeply in denial that anything could kill either of them, as though they were somehow immune from mortality, as though merely surviving against great odds meant one always would, that one needed little worry.

At this point, Kaisa had reason to be frustrated. Humans had an incredible sense of duty to one another, and that could certainly be leveraged to get them to work on their issues but from xer studies on human psychology xe also knew that that was not a healthy way of dealing with their fears of loss or their own delusions of immortality.

At the same time, the highest ranking non-commissioned officer, or NCO in human military speak, Amelia, the one who had shown Kaisa in, was well respected within the squadron, and according to her the sessions were making a difference. Ensign and Lieutenant Andala were pushing themselves to learn the names and homeworlds of the pilots they were serving with. 

**

“You’re from the Procyon system colony, right Amelia?”

“Yep. Third wave colonial family. We’ve built a pretty good life for ourselves, but when my term came up…I always wanted to be a pilot, and I was good enough that I got through selection.” It was good having Lt. Andala paying attention, taking an interest, especially since she and her husband had been personal heroes of mine since I was in middle school. They were getting back on track. 

The downside of them being back on track was a much more brutal training schedule that was pushing all of us in ways we hadn’t been pushed since basic, but that was a small price to pay for the increase in survivability we were seeing. A dozen sabers and pilots KIA in a battle was leaps and bounds a head of twenty or thirty on average.

“And Delta Section leader is from the same world?”

“Yep. And what about Alpha section leader?”

“If I recall correctly, Dacas II. And Bravo section leader actually started in the Antares colonies and had their initial service in the Fourth Armada, during the Kyriion crisis.” Amelia nodded. “And Charlie section leader?”

“You’re Charlie section leader.” She nodded, chuckling, and Jake rolled his eyes. “Come on, we do keep track of who is in charge of what.” 

“Right, should have seen that. Any questions about the squadron’s performance?”

“Actually, no. We’re doing a joint training exercise today, full squadron to engage. We’re going to go into the sim pods today, higher-than-realistic force for mixed-element Keldebriar force scenario. Once that’s over, we review how it went and what the results are before mess.”

“Yes ma’am.”

**

After the sim was over, the first set-piece sim out of the dozens they’d run in months that wound up being a definitive victory for the squadron, albeit with a significant loss rate that required improvement, the review session started. Communications, team maneuvers, and defensive formations were discussed.

All the same, when Jake and Callie slipped into bed that night, they were proud. The squadron, just over two hundred pilots left to it, was improving. The finest pilots in the galaxy, and the two of them had finally proven worthy of being their leaders. Holding each other in the darkness of their quarters, the two pilots, both human and Nathian, let themselves feel more relaxed than they had in months, if not years. Since leaving their adoptive homeworld, in fact, when they realized that peace was not for them.

“Hey Jake?” He grunted, signaling her to continue. “This isn’t a bad home, is it? I mean, home is still the world we grew up on, but I’m starting to feel more and more at home on the Khan.” He nodded. “Yeah, yeah that sounds about right. And the squadron are…I’m glad Amelia called out our shit. They deserve better than we were giving them. And…honestly? Damn proud of them all.”

“Yeah. Now, we’ve been working hard for the last few months. We might get pasted if the Keldebriar show up tomorrow.”

Jake chuckled. “Us? Die? Look, you survived freaking Kyriion, I don’t think we’re mortal. But if you’re going where I think you’re going…” He rolled over and kissed her. “I am of course, yours to command, Mrs. Lieutenant Andala.”

“Alright then.”

**

The next day the squadron made more than a few jokes in the mess about their commanders’… glow the next morning. It was good to hear the jokes, though. It made the two of them feel a little more at home, among friends. “Add that to the squadron’s official rules. No rank in the mess.”

Kaisa watched from a distance, smiling, as xe devoured xer rations. Humans…they always surprised you. Xe’d kept her promise to Namna, though. The Captain’s brother and sister were coming back to themselves, to what they should be. Warriors, but well-bonded ones with a sense of joy in their comrades.


	13. Unwelcome Guests

Adisa’s approach to the lost world of Rietarch was methodical. Ritia was excruciatingly careful, evading the sensor beacons and flying into a blind spot on the moon to allow Shaed, Adisa and Brimas aboard the atmospheric shielding station, where they quickly stole the codes they needed to get through the landing shields into a smuggler’s port. They were going to remain unnoticed. The system had definitely been rebuilt, and in a militaristic direction.

The smuggling port was still definitely allowed, but that made sense. Murdoch wouldn’t shut such places down, he relied on them for trade, since no one would work with a renegade world. 

She went over the plan for how people were to deploy once they left the ship. There was a hatch on the top of the ship that she wanted Doakes to take so he’d have a clear shot around the rest of the landing yard. Shaed should probably exit, invisible, ahead of her, and get to an angle where he could use his own ripper submachine gun to greatest effect. Andonix was carrying his weapons, of course, but he was also carrying a large crate of Euphozine as a way of establishing themselves as a smuggling crew instead of an infiltrating force looking to eliminate a dangerous war criminal with local power.

A group of individuals, all humans in masks, though that was pretty common for black market. Ripper submachineguns weren’t uncommon either. Even the sight of last-gen plasma rifles wouldn’t have been too shocking for a well-connected smuggling port.

The near-perfect military discipline the unit displayed on approach made it uncommon. The high-grade, barely-outdated light armor made it uncommon. That was an unsettling touch. Now, as she had armor-piercing rounds that would be able to take care of it, it could be worse, and certainly nothing they had would stop Doakes sniper rounds, but the presence still showed a significant threat. A few other humans lounged around with a far more relaxed stance, along with a handful of Ivari, some Tenebrae, some Vulpexi, Tyrsians, and even a few Ambrin citizens who presumably weren’t happy in their safe, isolationist bubble. These were quickly attempting to hide as quickly as possible, before the soldiers spotted them, and the others quickly attempted to pretend they were involved in a legitimate business dealing. 

One of the smugglers already in the port tossed out an offer. “We have some nanite cannisters for the bribe, Lieutenant. If you want to just…let it go that there are non-humans on the ground here…”

The officer paused, then nodded. “Yeah, that’ll do. Nanite cannisters for your crew, rounds from theirs, and from the new landing…what’re you bringing?” Adisa answered honestly, “Euphozine,” to which the officer nodded. “Ah, and the hospitals in the Echo sector were just about to run out of the painkillers, and looks like you fuckers brought over two hundred liters. Alright, ten percent of that gets taken for free, and the rest goes at standard market rate.”

That was actually…pretty good, for bribes. If they were offering this, even at reasonably mild bribe rates, it explained how they were able to gather a significant amount of material, which would in turn, make them fairly dangerous. The soldiers, to Adisa’s mild surprise, all stood perfectly still, without a sound.

They all seemed to be about the same height and build as well, though standard-issue nonpower armor tended to make all builds look pretty similar. Still, the experienced special operative hadn’t gotten to be the top of Viper Team without learning to trust her instincts. Something was off about those men. 

The soldiers handed over the money, and then left, loading the nanite cannisters, drugs and ammunition onto a cargo truck and making their exit. Adisa started asking around among the other smugglers for information, signaling quietly for Doakes to continue watching her back, and for Shaed to start listening in to as many conversations as possible. She mingled among the smugglers and began spreading bribes for what was good money around here, any rumors related to who was in charge.

“It’s that guy Adisa fingered at the new path.” Adisa was relieved that she’d paid for the brutal cosmetic workover she had, she looked like just another lowlife smuggler instead of the legendary operative she was. “Murdoch what’s-‘s-face. Let a buncha scared little civvies in a safe bunker during the Kyriion outbreaks, helped get them safe. You know how people get when they get scared, they’ll follow anyone. I mean, you heard the propaganda here?”

Adisa shook her head. “New to the market, and they don’t exactly advertise, you know?” The other guy started chuckling. “Fair enough. Apparently, Ivari spread the plague from their homeworld on purpose and have been using it and so many other secrets to rule the galaxy, yeah, including the Vulpexi.”

“Fucking hell that’s some creepy shit.” Actually it brought back memories history lessons of more than a few dictators in the 20th and 21st centuries. Though unlike in those cases, where all their rhetoric was based on outright lies, where Murdoch’s propaganda here was more in the business of distorting actual fact. The plague had originated with the Ivari but they’d had no way of figuring out how much worse they were making it. The Ivari were keeping secrets and had crossed more than a few lines during the Dominion war, but those had been answered well by the current Ivari government, even if the elitism and secret-keeping hadn’t been, but the mere fact that the Alliance of Free Species existed in contrast to the Federation was proof that they weren’t puppeteering much, as did the general nature of humans’ involvement in the Vulpexi war.

“And his solution is, what exactly? Conquer all the other species? But then why trade with smugglers?”

“Ah, because he still needs material. And he’s not a threat, let’s be real, the Keldebriar and the Terran Republic would crush this motley bunch of racist amateurs if they needed to. He doesn’t have the support he needs to make a move yet.”

Adisa thought about it, and chatted around a bit. There were strange rumors about new soldiers, about how they all looked weirdly similar, which confirmed her own observations and made her think that Murdoch was, in fact, trying to grow supplemental soldiers who would be perfectly obedient to his orders, but if he was indoctrinating these people…

Owens talked to a few of the other groups as well, and reported back in, with Doakes keeping a special eye on the goings-on around.

“So, Sgt.,” the demolitions specialist said. “Apparently there’s a unit of those creepy masked troopers who rescue captives from the Sclunter. Do the same thing the marines do, wipe the fucking dogs out, but what they do with the captives…if they’re human, they get taken back here and initiated into this fucked up little human supremacist cult,” his eye twitched in a nervous tic that Adisa was certain he didn’t realize he had, “Or, if the rescuees are non-human, they either trade them with the consortium for material, or they keep them as labor here, to free up more humans as soldiers or specialized labor.”

Adisa winced. “They’re that bad? And damn, Endirmas wasn’t lying about the issues the consortium has with that, we’ll have to deal with that at some point.”

“Yeah, but for now…”

Brimas broke in. “If you’re worried about that, I should inform you, I slipped the confiscated goods archive here. They’re taking in genome construction nanites, but also pathogenic growing material. Now here’s a quick question, now that we know humans can be vaccinated against Kyriion and the rest of us can’t…”

Adisa swore as Shaed re-appeared on the loading ramp. “They’re…The soldiers. They’re all identical, they must have been cloned. Perfect mirrors of Murdoch himself. He’s got no shortage of decoys and he can use them to create a crisis and fake his own death all at once.”

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

But then…he wouldn’t use a clone of himself to deliver a Kyriion weapon. And he’d gotten a bit of her blood after the fight on the New Path.

Oh, fuck…

“Brimas, find out wherever it is he’s going, we need to find him and we need to kill him, NOW!”


	14. Keld Prisoner

Tiger Squadron fought in the vast expanse of empty, cold space. It should have been frightening, cold, and now that they had their hearts back for their pilots, Jake and Callie had some fear again, but gods! This battle was still glorious. Pushed to the absolute brink against equals, with plasma bolts and the “silver lightning” effect that trailed their projectile weapons fire lighting the endless void, with the actinic fire of antimatter warhead detonations bursting to life here and there in the cold oblivion.

Another Keldebriar Talon blew apart beneath Callie’s guns, and Jake chuckled into the comms. “Amelia, watch your six, Delta actual, take out her pursuer. Bravo-six, take out your flight leader’s tail, Bravo actual, watch yourself.”

Callie kept it up, “Delta-two, Delta-nine, corkscrew peregrine maneuver, see if you can bore a clean shot at that carrier craft for Jake.”

“10-4, Lieutenant.” 

The two of them spiraled past each other, scything through the enemy formations quickly, most of the enemy sweeping out and away before they could be taken out, and Jake streaked into the tunnel to launch his deadly, now-upgraded 25-kiloton warhead to blast apart the carrier, before streaking aside and blazing away against a few more of the cats. Callie streaked in against his worse pursuer and fired a series of low-power plasma rounds at the wings, crippling the ship, but not breaching the hull or cockpit.

Having lost their carrier and rapidly running out of steam, the Keldebriar retreated, rapidly, the one crippled ship remaining behind. Jake and Callie ordered their squadron to sound off. They’d lost six today, but had neutralized twenty-four Keldebriar fighters and one carrier. It was a small skirmish, and without that carrier the enemy would likely be forced to wait some time before launching another, meaning that Tiger Squadron would have time to lick its wounds, train, and review what had been done well and what had been done poorly. This particular skirmish had been light on losses for both sides, save for the carrier, but of late the Keldebriar had seemed less heavy-hitting, less committed, as though their goal was to keep up pressure than to fight an all-out war.

The captured Talon craft was grabbed by a tractor beam from the Khan, and brought it into an airlock for damaged and captured craft. More than a few Vulpexi Bladeshells had wound up in there during the Dominion war, but this was the first Talon to be captured. The Keldebriar cracked the cockpit and vaulted out, vibro-blade and flachette pistol in hand. Tiger Squadron pilots weren’t trained for ground combat much, but after a Sclunter war-boss had gotten clever and landed pirates aboard the Khan – forcing them to win by putting on exopaks and opening the airlock – they’d gotten a lot more careful about training for the possibility of a boarding. They approached with flachette guns at the ready.

Then the pilot spoke. “I am Dastn y’Tas, of Preiman Elta, and give my word that I hereby surrender with honor to the Terran Republic unit, Tiger Squadron.” Then, as though preforming a ritual, he laid down his weapons, and held his arms out in front of him, coiling his tail around his own neck, waiting.

Jake and Callie lowered their weapons, slowly. “Alright, we accept your surrender. We’ll have to put you in the brig for now, we have our own dead to attend to, but we will be by to talk to you shortly.” The Keldebriar saluted. “As you wish.”

Jake saw the enemy pilot escorted to the brig, then met back up with Callie and spoke. “They’re an…interesting people, aren’t they? He actually asked if he could know the names of those we lost today, so that he could offer prayers for them as well. Said it was his people’s tradition to do so for respected opponents.”

Callie smiled. “That does speak well of the Keldebriar, yes.” The service for those they had lost, whose bodies would now drift through the void and see cremation in a star, was solemn, but the words were thoughtful. Those they had lost would be remembered as members of Tiger Squadron, their names inscribed on the bulkhead of the Khan forever. 

That had been a tradition that had arisen of late. Every member of Tiger Squadron ever KIA would now have their name, rank and homeworld inscribed on the walls of the mighty carrier, so that anyone who felt the need to honor a comrade could do so. The pilots who had been lost during the Dominion war, the police actions against the pirates, those lost against the Keldebriar, all had a place upon the Wall.

The inscriptions were seen to, then Jake and Callie went back to speak with their prisoner.

“I scented welding material. Is that a part of human funeral rites?”

“Not usually. We inscribe the names of the fallen of this squadron onto the carrier’s wall.”

“A most excellent custom.” The Keld’s voice was laced with genuine respect. “Before my people clashed with yours, we had few, if any, we respected as rivals. The Emperor, Therion e’Klae, has ordered our people into battle with yours after the treachery against our Ambassador aboard the New Path Station, but as the battles have continued, and our spies indicate that Adisa’s account may well hold true, the war has grown increasingly unpopular among us. Still, we are bound to wage battle against you until Murdoch is found and brought to justice.”

Jake winced. “That’s unfortunate. He’s fled Alliance void space, and Adisa is on his trail. But as we have no idea where he is, we can’t turn him over.”

The Keldebriar paused. “Oh? Well then, that is most fascinating. I would appreciate permission to inform my people of this, but if you choose not to provide an ansible for my use, I will understand. Your people have had few opponents who would not use such an opportunity for treachery.”

The Keldebriar stood quietly, silently and waited for Jake and Callie to talk it over.

“He’s joking, right?”

“Can’t be. He’s seriously requesting it. He might be calling in reinforcements to attack the Khan and attack us again for holding him prisoner.”

“Might be, Jake, but think about the reports Shiloh Hendrix gave us about Keldebriar co-operating during the final campaigns to eradicate the Synthor. If this one sends back a positive report about honorable treatment, the Terran Republic gains a bit more credibility when we say that Adisa was not responsible for the attack.”

Jake sucked in a breath between his teeth. “I don’t like it, but I like the ongoing attrition against them less. Alright.”

Callie turned to the prisoner and handed him an ansible, then spoke. “You may send a report, and communicate with your family. If you give them any actionable intelligence, we will cut off the conversation. You will speak in Galick, not your native tongue, so that we can understand the conversation. Do we understand each other?”

The Keldebriar nodded. “Yes, of course.” He picked up the ansible and sent a signal, then began speaking into it. “As you know by now, Admiral, the carrier of my fighter group has been destroyed in action. My Talon was crippled and I was taken prisoner, and I am now being held aboard a carrier unit called the Khan. The humans who have taken me prisoner are treating me well, and operate with a sense of honor. It is as Commander Therion said, humans have the capacity to be an ally of our people, I believe. Further, they assure me that Adisa was not the one responsible for the attack on the New Path, and that Murdoch, a renegade of unknown location, is the one responsible for the strike.”

A voice came through on the other end. “They allowed you to speak to me. That speaks well of them. They have bought themselves a week of peace for this act. My finest hunters will depart in pursuit of this Murdoch, and will ally with Adisa to combat a mutual threat. However, until the renegade Murdoch is dead, there will remain no peace between our peoples. Admiral Tamilan, out.” 

Dastn then dialed the ansible to his family and began speaking. “I have been captured by humans and am thus far being afforded safe conduct as a prisoner of war. I will likely return home at the conclusion of hostilities.” A few mewling voices came through the ansible, worried for him, and he spoke again, “Don’t worry. Your father is fine. I will be home to see you again, little ones. I promise.”

He handed the ansible back over to Jake, who nodded. “Alright. May I inquire as to your people’s dietary needs? I’ve never had one aboard before.”

“Meat, thank you.” Callie nodded. “Alright, well, the mess section is cold at the moment but once we warm it up we’ll have some food brought to you.”

“I wait patiently, human. May I have the honor of my captors’ names?”

“Yes, I’m Lieutenant Callie Andala, and my husband and second in command is Ensign Jake Andala.” The Keldebriar made a quiet wheezing sound, and laughed to them. “Your people allow mated pairs to fight together? That is good. Warriors fight better when fighting alongside their loved ones. I look forward to the future, in hopes that our peoples will some day fight together against a common enemy.”

“Actually I’m hoping we’ll manage to avoid any further conflict.” Jake’s voice was a bit tired. “Having a squadron to worry about has me hoping I never spill blood again.”

Dastn made another wheeze. “That is the way of the universe. Battles always rage, and in each people there are those who defend the others. There is nothing wrong with that. Keldebriar honor is strict for a reason. If war will always occur between the mighty, it is important that all have rules to abide by, no?”

Callie shrugged. “Humans hope to end war. We’ve never quite managed it, but we still hope.” She and Jake left the brig, sitting with their squadron, eating, and answering questions about the prisoner. CPO Amelia greeted them, inquiring about the prisoner.

“He’s sincere. We’ll feed him when the rest of us fall in for mess. Hopefully we can barter him back to the Empire as a show of good faith, a peace offering to slow down hostilities.” Amelia nodded. “Understood, Lieutenant. Skirmish review is ready to start.”

The skirmish had had relatively few mistakes, but a few new ideas came to mind. “Alright, I want to try keeping a slightly wider dispersal formation, keep in groups of three to cover each other. One to draw, one to distract, one to neutralize. The distraction should come from the side, the killer from beneath. A few other maneuvers come to mind. A somewhat better peregrine corkscrew, with a second echelon to cover flanking or rear attacks.”

The pilots nodded, but groaned as Jake finished Callie’s list. “Oh, and starting tomorrow we’ll be drilling hard for at least nine standard hours, after which we will continue the teambuilding and review process for an additional five.” The training schedule was harsher than it had once been, but that was a small price to pay for higher survivability and better connections. Still, fourteen hour training schedule would be brutal.

Kaisa reflected on what she was observing with the other non-human crew members, the Nathian shrinks and medics, plus Palnt engineers and repair experts. Humans had an impressive tolerance for exhaustion and pain, and seemed mildly invigorated by demanding schedules.

Then again, that might actually be because Tiger Squadron had a rather…unusual rule for fraternization. They were far enough out into space and often operated independently long enough that the usual regulations were often ignored. Really, the rules of relationships were between the pilots were, “Keep it consensual, keep it off-duty, and don’t keep anyone else awake.” Tiger Squadron personnel took turns cooking, which had resulted in a few unfortunate incidents when someone neglected to mention that they sucked at cooking.

The Khan, Jake and Callie reflected after their own ‘couple time’ in their quarters, for all its madness, was home.


	15. Healer's Honor

The planet she beheld was a Keldebriar one. The Keldebriar were proud, honorable, and kept to absolutely strict rules about harming civilians. They had been more than willing to fight against the mutual threat of the Synthor and Kyriion alongside humans, even when other forces of theirs were fighting humans elsewhere.

Humans though, they were smart enough to know that if you wanted to bring an enemy down, you didn’t stop with their warriors. You followed them home, burned it to the ground and then built them back up in your image once they agreed to surrender. If you couldn’t do that…well, look what the Romans had done at Carthage. The plague would ravage this system, and the Keldebriar…well, they’d lose one of their more prosperous agricultural worlds, and if they had any sense they’d quarantine the whole sector, preventing the foundries and manufacturing plants from getting much in the way of ships or weaponry. 

She might have pondered if she was willing to sacrifice herself to engage in an act of biological terrorism that would cause terror in the hearts of just about every living being in the galaxy. She almost felt guilty about the horror she was about to unleash on unsuspecting Keldebriar.

Almost. Might have. If the vat grown, nano-constructed clones that Murdoch had built were capable of such things. She slipped down onto the planet and began setting up for the attack.

**

The Keldebriar governor in charge of Typhon Emerlis took in the growing reports of outbreak with horror. While the evacuation was going well, and those who were infected were doing the right thing with energy-based self-destruction, at the rate the plague was spreading, an entire continent would soon be lost. Over eighty thousand were infected. Kyriion was no common virus, it learned from every outbreak and made itself more capable. 

And because of previous outbreaks on Keldebriar worlds, that meant it knew full well that his people would immolate themselves before they’d risk infecting their families. Which meant he could expect the next tens of thousands of infected to be completely asymptomatic for quite some time. Presently, the contaminated continent had warriors and healers deployed to preform blood tests on all trying to leave, a precaution he knew meant that more of the currently uninfected there would be infected and doomed to die, and die horribly, before this was over.

All the same, letting them leave the continent, letting even one infected individual off that and to the rest of the world meant a very real risk of losing the entire planet to the disease that killed entire worlds. There had been some report, scattered and uncertain, a few days ago that the woman behind the attack on the New Path had been intercepted and killed while loosing the cannisters of this plague, alongside the man who she’d accused, meaning they had in fact been in it together.

**

The leader of the Healer unit deployed to the triage camp had already shot past terror and was becoming simply numb to the horror. They had some medicine to heal the injuries the panicked crowds had suffered, and had the ability to treat more conventional diseases, but for those confirmed to be infected with Kyriion, the Healer’s duty was more solemn, harder. Mercy killing was a nightmare for any who swore to preserve life, but Kyriion being what it was it was truly a mercy, to both the infected and those they might infect.

And he’d done it to two hundred people today alone, and ordered their bodies and any spilled blood irradiated. And worse yet, six of them had been completely asymptomatic, begging for mercy, saying the tests had to be mistaken.

Which might be even worse, now that he thought about it. Kyriion adapted to be able to spread, and it was smart. Being completely without symptoms and being mercy killed anyway, if there were witnesses, meant less trust by those being tested, meant they might decide to riot, meant it might spread further. 

Almost as if reading his mind, one individual, a child, awaiting the results of her test began panicking, saying she didn’t want to die, screaming…and of course, that was the moment the symptoms first started appearing. Oh, it wasn’t a big one. Slight discoloration of tears, slight contraction of hand muscle that cracked the claws at the base, but enough to notice. He felt like crying, having to do this to a child, but pointed out the symptoms and drew her forward, then gave her the gift of mercy.

Unfortunately, that was when it all broke loose.

Riots, panicked crowds, some committing suicide, some attacking the triage camps, many simply attempting to escape. He knew what he had to do. He knew that giving this order, or obeying it, even now, was a death sentence. But better him and his security detail, and all these people, than a world. “Begin emergency purge.”

A comm receiver started screaming, with Alliance of Free Species codes.

**

Namna was shouting into the comms with the governor of Typhon Emerlis, “I am with the Alliance of Free Species Aid Corps, we have some methods, not excellent or foolproof but some, of containing a Kyriion outbreak and making it at least possible that some of the infected will survive, I request permission to land.”

“Your Viper and Spider caused the outbreak, your people are untrustworthy. If you attempt to land I will order you eliminated on the spot as war criminals.”

Namna swore furiously, especially as lifesign scanners and outbreak emergency beacons indicated that this outbreak was likely to claim a billion sapient lives if something wasn’t done. One Aid Corps rescue-class ship wasn’t likely to be enough. She’d called for a Savior-class cruiser, the Homeward Grace, specifically, to arrive as quickly as it could but her small unit could make a difference in this, save at least some of the lives that would otherwise be lost. 

She purr-chirped to Shen. “I wonder if this is how she felt. Shiloh Hendrix, when she defied the Star Marshal to keep Jake and Callie alive during the Crisis.”

Shen shrugged. “Could well be, Ma’am. What are you going to do?”

Namna smiled, sadly. “Same thing my siblings’ protector did. All units, strap in. Pilot, take us down, evade any defending turret. Prepare to have biological hot zone exopacks on upon landing and warm up the emergency antibody vats, we are going to need a LOT of those. And send similar orders to the Homeward Grace, today no one dies without an attempt to save them. Aid Corps, prepare to drop!”

Nathians murmured that Namna had been spending too much time with humans as the pilot began plunging through the atmosphere, evading the fire of defensive systems with all the skill he’d honed as a fighter pilot back before they’d gotten tired of killing and decided to transfer. She’d already issued orders that Galri coralgliders could not land on Typon Emerlis, living ships could be infected so any aid to come from those had to come from orbit. The ship evaded the fire until it finally touched down, barely kicking in the landing hover pods in time to avoid a brutal crash. The ship had only just decelerated to safe velocities as the Aid corps threw off their restraints and began throwing on biological safety gear and beginning to unload the sealed antibodies they’d created. A handful of Keldebriar warriors stopped them but Namna stood in front of her unit. “We’ve come to help, there’s a way to give the infected a fighting chance! Please, lay down your arms, we don’t want to hurt you. I don’t know what’s going on but we want to help!” 

The Keldebriar soldier raised his weapon, then lowered it. “I may face serious consequences for this, but the Imperial Garrison here accepts your aid. If there’s even a chance…”

Namna saluted and shouted out then, “Good, start helping us move the antibody cannisters, and escort us to the main triage camp if you can.”

**

“Lord Governor, there’s a Nathian-led Aid Corps ship from the AFS, they’re providing medical assistance on the contaminated continent. The soldiers aren’t firing on them, apparently the Galri know a way to slow the progress of a Kyriion outbreak. They’re starting the treatments on the afflicted, helping us maintain the quarantine, and they’ve apparently requested a much bigger ship to help, and want permission for it to land.”

The governor looked on in shock and showed his teeth. “I may owe the Alliance my apologies. Give permission for the Aid Corps to land and issue orders that they are to be granted all assistance we can manage.”

**

Namna’s world was horror and death, but also hope. Shen ran around, moving the heavy Keldebriar as she slammed the genetically-sterile antibodies and white blood cells into them, hoping against hope that the style that had worked well for humans and very occasionally for her own people could work for the Keldebriar. All the same, the contortions of the Keldebriar victims of the plague, the screaming, the bleeding, the contractions that pushed bone through flesh towards the end, were horrific to watch. 

Namna kept working, taking a moment to breath as the  _ Homeward Grace _ came down and disgorged fully-equipped Aid Corps personnel and more material to work with. The Keldebriar healer chief was working with her, swapping anecdotes as he worked, asking questions about what was going on. Several Aid Corps coralgliders were now in orbit as well, and Namna’s own rescue-class ship was ferrying the material they grew down to the surface for fear of infecting the living ship above.

Shen was holding down a Keld undergoing the convulsions, and Namna gave a gentle gesture to the Keldebriar looking on, who quickly delivered the rite of mercy. “Once the final convulsions start it’s too late to do anything. Keep focusing on those just infected.”

The Keldebriar healers nearby continued their work, while all around them the dying were quickly eliminated, their bodies irradiated and burned to ensure the virus did not survive. Survivors and the freshly infected were tended to, and those still clean were kept well-segregated from the ill and dying.

Namna lost track of the days. Shen never stopped working.

The Aid Corps cycled through, dead piling up around them, survivors being released as those who could be saved were. Unlike Humans, who survived this horrible plague one time in three, the Keldebriar’s survival rate was closer to one in ten, but as the days wore on, it dropped to one in twenty five and then to one in fifty as the virus learned. Namna would check on patients she thought she’d saved to find their bones jutting from torn, contraction-ruined flesh, and order the bodies taken away and cleansed.

The outbreak eventually ended. The virus was carefully purged and destroyed where it could be found, and the dead were once more blasted with radiation to ensure the bodies were sterile before burial. No one wanted Kyriion in the soil.

It had only been a week, and over a quarter billion lives had ended, in agony because of the sapient virus. And to top it off, the Keldebriar emperor himself had left their core world to meet with the Aid corps.

He arrived with minimal fanfare, and spoke a solemn oath for those lost to the plague. Then he ordered Namna forward, along with her crew, and with a single claw, pinned a medal to their uniforms. “In honor of your succor and medical aid to my people, I grant you this, the Bronze Telas, the highest award a non-Keldebriar can receive from us. You are further granted titles of honorary nobility, for your reckless heroism in disregarding threats against you in order to bring aid.”

Then, to Namna’s strange honor, Emperor Therion e’Klae, Lord and Protector of the Keldebriar, held out a hand, claws retracted, and matched his pads to Namna’s in his people’s gesture of ultimate respect. “You came to the aid even of an enemy to protect the innocent against a nightmare of all life,” he intoned, “And for that, I honor you.”


	16. Destabilization

Adisa cursed herself and Murdoch as the reports of the Kyriion outbreak on Typhon Emerlis started coming in. A quarter billion dead in less than a week, cunningly both using a clone of himself and herself in order to falsify his own death and end the manhunt, while also condemning her and spinning up distrust against Terran Republic. She hadn’t been able to find her clone in time to stop the attack. A quarter billion were dead because of him.

Though from the sounds of it, the Aid Corps intervention, led by Chief Namna, had resulted in better feelings for the Alliance as the whole by the Keldebriar Empire.

Still, with a war crime like that…

The Mamba forced herself back on task. This section of Rietarch was a slum, groups of humans who opposed Murdoch’s secession and the brutality displayed towards the nonhuman races held prisoner on the planet, along with several alien species. Adisa was beginning to work on a more traditionally spec ops approach to deal with a brutal dictatorship. Start helping train up locals to fight against an oppressive government. But first, show them it was possible to fight and win.

There were two light armored vehicles and a small unit of infantry making the rounds in the zone, with a surveillance drone flying overhead. There was an officer, not in the vehicles, giving orders to the soldiers. 

Brimas had control of the drones, and the vehicles were atop mines that Owens had so painstakingly set up. Adisa growled into her comms, “Game.”

“Set.” Shaed was in position to capture the officer, invisible and not far from him, while Andonix was in position to provide cover with his shredder.

“Match.” Doakes took up slack on the trigger as the charges went off, destroying the vehicles, and Doakes began firing into the soldiers as Shaed appeared behind the officer and choked him unconscious with both arms and tentacles. Andonix stepped forward and fired off two shredder blasts, forcing the soldiers to scatter as Doakes continued picking them off.

The Rietarch soldiers took up cover positions that Adisa sprinted to flank, cutting them down as quickly as she could with her submachinegun, and when they began setting up a megawatt laser position, Adisa tossed a grenade and took care of the problem.

The humans in this section, many of them captives from other worlds or simply people who’d been desperate during the outbreak began cheering, quickly taking up the weapons of the fallen Authority troopers, and donning their body armor as Adisa barked out orders. “Alright, Ritia, bring down the ship and begin loading as many of the kids aboard as possible, take them to Nathian worlds for now.”

Ritia nodded, then continued. “It’ll be a tight fit, ma’am, most of the space on this thing is for cargo. But I can get most of them, and if I promise Alliance credits, I’m certain I can get a few honorable smugglers to take the other kids, at least.”

“Understood. The Alliance will see to it that you get paid. We’ll manage here. I have a spider to crush.” There were very carefully no survivors among the enemy forces, with Brimas uploading previous footage of the square during patrol with altered timestamps on a stable loop to keep Murdoch from getting suspicious. 

The humans in the area picked up the soldiers’ weapons, those old enough to have been through the Terran Republic’s compulsory service, at least, those who had chosen military service, handling them with practiced ease, those less familiar avoiding the weapons and going to Owens for training in building explosives. Shaed reunited with a small handful of his own people, who had been having samples of their genetics taken in hopes of breeding clone troops for infiltration.

Adisa helped lead the militia troops in a few quick exercises, taking note of the fact that there were still quite a few people here who had no business fighting, needing some way to get them off world. 

She gave a briefing to the resistance unit she had assembled.

“Alright. So, here is where we stand. We’ve neutralized a small unit of Murdoch’s troops and seized their weapons, however, the majority of our fighters are still unarmed, and many more of those present are unable to fight. According to Brimas, there’s a shipyard not far from here that primarily docks personnel carriers and contains a small but well-stocked armory. However, that is not our next target, as we are still direly lacking in pilots.”

She continued speaking, ideas swirling in her head as she formed the rest of the plan. “According to Brimas, other species are brought into this sector to preform labor for Rietarch loyalists, alongside species heretics, as Murdoch is now calling the humans who go against his twisted ideals. However, Ivari are ushered off to concentration zones in a different part of this sector to be annihilated. Normally this doesn’t come up as Ivari tend to avoid this region as a result of Murdoch’s predations and the Sclunter, however Brimas tells me there’s a group of traders held captive in that camp right now. Our first operation is to capture that camp and extract those prisoners. While we do that, a different unit will make preparations to attack the shipyard from the east. The camp rescue group will rendezvous with them, but come from the south. Once we give the signal, the attack from the east is to begin, to draw as many Rietarch soldiers’ eyes as possible so that the remaining non-combatants can be loaded aboard the ships and sent off.”

A thought occurred to her, and she realized she was getting ahead of herself. “There needs to be a third operation preformed as well, one that’s significantly higher risk, ahead of the previously mentioned two. Someone will need to plant a subspace beacon on the comms tower without being noted, preferably an SOS tuned to Alliance frequencies so that we get something to cover them on exit or they’ll be sitting ducks when the patrolling fleet catches them.”

The rebel group nodded, and then someone asked the question. “Who’s going to plant the beacon?”

Shaed sighed. “A Tenebrac, as we can remain…much more easily unnoticed. This one will take the beacon. I will inform Adisa when the job is done.”

He hoisted his ripper on its strap, and palmed a flachette pistol. “I will be back in three days’ time. Stick to the shadows until then, comrades.” Adisa was always vaguely nervous about letting Shaed run off, she’d finally found his record and from the sheer number of blank points in it she was fairly sure that the only thing that separated Shaed from being a known contract killer was that he was very, very capable of not getting caught. She had a bit of preparation work to finish before the attack on the concentration camp and on the garrison. There was a small protective garrison in this section of the city itself that she wanted to deal with before it became a problem.

Adisa took Doakes, and Owens with her. The goal here was to allow Shaed and his team to plant the beacon, and doing that required neutralizing this garrison. “Brimas, take control of the distress beacon switch. Keep it from being activated.”

“Understood. I can get in in about six standard minutes. Don’t make any noise until then.” 

“It’s going to be more than six minutes before I get to the garrison barracks.”

“As you say.” Brimas disconnected, and Adisa continued moving carefully and quietly, through the streets. Rietarch citizens looked at the woman in Authority armor with nervous eyes.

Once she was clear from sight, she handed him his weapons back and signaled Doakes to get up a watchtower and eliminate the sniper watching from the top. Adisa went with Owens and slashed a few throats, quietly lowering the bodies and dragging them out of sight as Owens set heavy charges on the base’s power generator, which would cause fairly catastrophic damage when it was set off. Doakes took a few potshots at the handful of troopers who would likely find the bodies that Adisa had left around, then slithered down the tower, following his CO as she and their demolitions specialist fled the scene. Once at a safe distance, they blew the charges.

**

Andionx was watching from a safe point of ambush, waiting for the follow-up patrol that would be arriving after the first one missed its check-in. His shredder was ready to sweep them with devastation, while the rest of the militia prepared to eliminate any survivors of his opening barrages. The enemy soldiers came around the corner, ready to put down the xeno uprising, weapons raised.

Their last surprised sight was that of a shredder cannon’s bore.

**

Shaed was proving that Adisa’s suspicions about him were entirely justified. Six guards on the communications array. The first was at the door, and Shaed figured on saving him for last as he scaled the side of the building, his tentacles finding purchase as he hauled himself up the sheer building face, his chromataphroic skin blending into the simple concrete and steel until he could slither into a window. The first watchman died before he could scream.

Shaed blended into the wall, right ahead of where the second man would see the first, then waited. As the second man came around, Shaed detached himself from the wall and choked the trooper out. Looking at the features of the men he’d slaughtered. Identical. Clones.

That made him feel mildly better as he crept up on the next two and mowed them down with a suppressed flachette pistol. Then, making his way up the next few floors, he quietly dispatched the one in the control room and planted the beacon. The last trooper moved through the door, only to have Shaed appear behind him and whisper, “Farewell, vat grown.” Tentacles slid over the last target’s mouth and quieted his dying scream.

**

Adisa smiled as her team reassembled. All tasks at hand before the first real play had been cleared. Once more people got there, she could start recreating her work here in other sectors of the planet, create as much chaos as she could and arrange for Murdoch’s exposal, downfall, and assassination.


	17. Shot down

Callie sipped her coffee, smiling slightly as she tasted the cream. She wasn’t quite sure how Jake had gotten the creamer, but he kept claiming he knew a guy in logistics who knew a few smugglers. Cream wasn’t really illegal, obviously but like so many other comfort rations it was often the last to arrive in actual supply shipments, which in turn created quite a market for it within the consortium, who were fond of filling market niches that more official sources couldn’t or wouldn’t. 

Which was a huge damn upgrade over what the Vulpexi had been as a Dominion. They still had some shady dealings, but by all accounts, the Blorgi phile had finally seized power and were ruthlessly cracking down on those with the more exploitative practices. 

Such economic analysis was hardly standard for a starfighter ace over coffee, or even a commander thereof, but it kept her mind off of what she knew she was going to have to explain eventually.

Dastn, the Keldebriar prisoner they’d taken, had been quite taken with the idea of bacon as a breakfast food, as his homeworld had no pigs, it was a delicious and exotic delicacy. “Bacon. Irresistible even to aliens.” It was an amusing thought. He’d also been quite shocked by the idea of coffee. The chemical structure of caffeine, once explained to him, had been cursed as a poison by his people, but humans apparently drank it to help wake them up. Insane creatures, but they hadn’t been treating him badly so it was acceptable. Today, however, the Terran Republic had sent them to strike at the star base where many of the attacks against their position had been launched from. Dastn knew something they didn’t about the target. Knew that a squadron he’d been slated to transfer to was stationed there. The Hunters’ Apex, the best pilots in the Empire, were prepared to pounce against the Khan and its pilots upon arrival. 

He couldn’t tell them this, of course. Still, he hoped they wouldn’t be battered too badly, or take too many casualties. He was beginning to enjoy Tiger Squadron, and hoped that at some point, they and Hunters’ Apex would fly together. 

**

The pilots were secure in their cockpits, and Jake was tense. They were about to be jettisoned from the carrier’s hangars, and sent to attack a Keldebriar star base. Targeting the base itself would prove no obstacle, but he knew it would be a hard fight, and the kind of thing that would give their opponents a considerable tactical advantage on defense. Engaging the Keldebriar aggressively was always an act of idiocy, unless you could force them into a contest of endurance through static defense, which starfighter piloting would never be. On dynamic defense, the reflexes and ambush tactics of their opponents reigned supreme, but orders were orders and that meant they had to take that base out. 

Dropping from hyperspace in three, two, one…

“Tiger Squadron, FANGS OUT!” The squadron burst from the hangars, already firing on the base with all the missiles and torpedoes they had, the act of coming out of a carrier firing apparently one unanticipated even by the Keldebriar, who plunged from the surrounding space and began breaking off to engage the human fighters.

The team doctrine they had worked out ahead of time was saving lives, but the Keldebriar commander quickly adapted. Only twenty of Talons had been destroyed when the tide of battle turned back in the defenders’ favor, quickly engaging in maneuvers impossible even for Jake or Callie, tearing through Tiger Squadron’s formation. 

Callie cursed and managed to take on Talon upon the sudden reversal, peppering it with grav gun rounds until it blew apart before her own engines were blasted out, rendering her drifting at high speed towards the ruined hulk of a base before Jake hit her with a repulsor coil, commonly used as a rescue technique for a craft with destroyed engines under the bidding of Newton’s First Law. She sighed in relief, even as the impact made her feel sick, before seeing one of Jake’s engines lit up, sending him into a spiral towards the hostile planet.

***

The Keldebriar’s initial shock and awe attack had begun to waver and Amelia pressed her edge as hard as she could, starting to shatter their tight formations through persistence and teamwork, but no sooner had the initial wave started to pull back and a second started rising than the LT’s voice came through the comms. “ALL UNITS, RETREAT!”

Tiger squadron and the Khan jumped to safety, and it wasn’t until their return to their own territory that they realized they’d lost thirty-two pilots…including Delta Section leader, Jake and Callie themselves.

Amelia walked to the cell where the prisoner was held and asked him, “If Jake and Callie are captured by your people, what happens to them?” Dastn showed his teeth. “Provided they surrendered honorably? They would be fitted with restraints, taken to a secure facility, and then released from said restraints and shown to their quarters, there to wait out the rest of the war or await being exchanged as prisoners of war.”

Amelia sighed and took charge, as the most senior NCO and with both officers gone, she was in command of the squadron for now. There were names to carve into the Wall, but until they knew who was missing and who was dead, that would not be possible until they had confirmations of who had been taken prisoner. 

**

Jake’s impact to the soil of the Keldebriar world was hard, unforgiving. His injuries were minor thanks to the inertial dampening, but his nose was definitely bleeding and the ship’s exterior was still glowing with heat from the plunge through the atmosphere. As the outer hull cooled, Callie came down, with a pair of Keldebriar fighters flanking her ship, her Saber clearly under their power, and dozens of Keldebriar warriors approaching the crash site with weapons at the ready. Jake opened the cockpit and drew his flachette pistol and vibroknife, in deliberate mirror of what Dastn had done when captured, then gently set them down in front of him. 

Callie joined him a moment later, and threw down her weapons as the Keldebriar stepped forward, quickly slipping cuffs over their wrists, magnetized to keep their hands no more than a few centimeters apart. “Your names?”

“Lieutenant Callie Andala. My second is my husband, Ensign Jake Andala, Tiger Squadron.” The Keldebriar officer capturing them paused, then saluted. “To capture the commanders of such a unit…truly a victory for the Hunters’ Apex, though at quite a cost. My name is Mithran y’Tas,” the Keldebriar bowed deeply, “And am I given to understand that you two are a mated pair? I know human family names matching can mean that, and you share few phenotypical similarities.”

Jake nodded. “Yes, you are correct.”

The Keldebriar nodded. “As well. My brother, Dastn y’Tas, was taken prisoner by your unit. I would have word of him.”

“He’s well, being treated as comfortably as we can given that all the space we have to work with on our carrier. But he’s comfortable, well-fed, and being treated honorably.” 

Mithran bowed, and nodded. “Take them away. Give them fair quartering, and let them remain together. Further, give them an ansible and allow them to contact their own squadron to inform them of the situation.”

The two of them were escorted to a secure facility, patrolled by a handful of Keldebriar warriors, who gruffly marched them to a room in the facility. A facility with no windows and doors that locked from the outside, but one that also would have passed for an otherwise fairly nice motel room on any Terran Republic world. “Wow. This is where they keep their prisoners of war? That’s uh…that’s pretty nice. I actually feel kinda shitty about where we’ve been keeping Dastn now.” An ansible was thrust through a gap in the door and they began speaking to Amelia. “Chief Petty Officer, you are in temporary command of Tiger Squadron, and we have been taken prisoner by the Keldebriar. No other prisoners have been taken to our knowledge, but we are safe and being treated honorably.”

Amelia’s voice came in on the other end. “Sir, Ma’am. We lost thirty pilots today, and you two were the only ones alive of those unaccounted for. Maybe you two are immortal, after all. Should we attempt to exchange you?” 

Jake paused. “We only have one prisoner. Unless they’re willing to do a two-for-one, I doubt you can, but there’s no harm in asking.”

The commander of the Keldebriar forces was apparently waiting outside, and from the other side of the door came the words, “Unfortunately no, though I admire your determination to remain with your mates. You will remain here, unless your people capture another prisoner to exchange.”

Callie continued the discussion through the ansible, “They do not do two-for-one trades, sadly. You’re in command for now. This war shouldn’t be going a whole lot longer, though. You’re an excellent pilot and leader, you’ll do fine.” 

“Thank you, ma’am.” The ansible went quiet, and the guard took it back. 

The two leaders of Tiger Squadron, the greatest pilots of the Terran Republic began settling down in their cell, noting the thin, flowing robes that had been provided in the cells as clothing for prisoners. The flight suits weren’t exactly comfortable for any position but that in the cockpit, so they quickly changed, and were pleasantly surprised to note the smoothness of the fabric. “Wow, they really are serious about fair treatment for honorably surrendered prisoners. We’ve been in hotels with rougher sheets than these, holy crap.” 

Callie rolled her eyes. “This is nice, yeah, but we’re still prisoners. Amelia is capable but I don’t want the squadron to face the Keldebriar without us.” 

Jake winced. “We don’t really have a choice. Unless we can escape and uh…just gonna throw this out there, Dastn hasn’t tried to escape once, I assume that’s part of their honor relating to prisoner conduct, and I would genuinely hate to find out what they do to foes who take advantage of their codes. I think we’re stuck here for now, Callie.”

Callie sighed. “Yeah.” Then she looked down, and realized that being trapped here, with a viable excuse not to engage in the high-speed maneuvers they were accustomed to for a few months would probably be for the best. “Alright. Let’s…let’s rest for now.”


	18. Uprising

Adisa was smirking, quietly, at the progress she’d made. The concentration camp had been attacked, the prisoners evacuated, and dozens of transports seized to escort them out, with masterful smuggling pilots managing to get to hyperspace under the moon’s mass shadow to allow human civilians and non-combatant species to escape before Rietarch patrol fleets had been able to engage them.

The beacon Shaed had planted had made the Terran Republic aware of the situation, and they’d dispatched many of their special operations units, as well as her old Viper team, to assist in further dealing with the problem posed by the Rietarch Confederacy, while promising heavier-hitting backup in a few standard months, however they noted that it would be better to neutralize the current regime in Rietarch first.

To that end, multiple teams had positioned themselves in multiple sectors of the planet, killed critical administrators, armed malcontents, and then slipped away, usually crippling those zones’ infrastructure with targeted sabotage, forcing the man in charge to constantly direct the clone troopers Murdoch’s heist had created to bring the uprisings under control. What had really impressed Adisa, time after time, was the number of humans who had taken up weapons, decided that it was worth fighting against the regime that preached conquest over co-operation, worth risking their lives for their ideals, those who had served the Terran Republic’s required two years, regardless of if they’d chosen military service or not, fought against those who had eagerly embraced the madness. From everyone she’d brought into the resistance, the song had remained the same: We fell in during the crisis because doing so meant survival, but we want to go back to the Terran Republic.

Sure, they’d had professional backup, and some training from the Viper Teams, and the really risky assassinations and sabotages had been preformed by the real professionals, but still, such heroism was truly awesome to behold. Which brought her to the present moment. She had been inserted, courtesy of Ritia, into the planetary capitol, where Brimas had located the man Murdoch had left in charge of Rietarch while he went off to create chaos elsewhere. Assassinating him would force Murdoch to intervene more actively, and likely trap him here when the fleet arrived to regain control of Rietarch. From everyone she’d brought into the resistance, the song had remained the same: We fell in during the crisis because doing so meant survival, but we want to go back to the Terran Republic.

Now though, her primary concern was for the team she’d assembled and the mission they were currently on. Neutralize the Commissar of the Rietarch Authority. He was moving in an armored convoy through the street of the capitol. Doakes was crouched in a water tower, precision gauss rifle at the ready to take the shots. The zone being moved into was wired with dozens of microcharges. A proper sweep would have, and in fact did pick up plenty of IEDs. Owens had placed those on purpose, after all, for security’s advanced sweep to find nothing would be more than mildly suspicious given that the enemy had almost certainly realized they were present.

There had been a number of sniper teams around the buildings. Had been. Her and Shaed had pretty meticulously wiped them out. Andonix wasn’t with them, this mission required subtlety and that wasn’t his strong suit. Ritia had transported him and a different unit to another sector to assist seizing control in it. The Tyrsian was terrible at stealth tactics but she was rapidly learning that he was a remarkable tactician and battle commander, who could be trusted in command of large swathes of the resistance fighters.

Focus, focus. She was in position to make the most of the ambush, alongside Shaed, while the militia had set up stolen and set up megawatt lasers to intercept the enemy forces in a few key points through the square. The parade was the sort of large military display that the Terran Republic had scrupulously avoided, large and grandiose as a display of power. Adisa noted, smugly, that the majority of the rank-and-file soldiers seemed to be more of those damn vatgrown troopers, as opposed to natural-born human beings. On one hand, the vatgrown forces had excellent reflexes and musculature, but they had little to no tactical sense of their own, which gave normal people with training and their own initiative a considerable edge over beings that would never question orders or come up with their own plans. 

The Commissar stepped out of his vehicle and stood at the podium, beginning to speak about how order would be maintained, how the might of Rietarch would not falter in the face of intervention by outside agitators obviously deceived by Ivari lies and pro-xeno propaganda, and continued speaking as his troops filed, unknowingly into the kill box. Then other soldiers began filing out of a different armored convoy, pulling along with them assorted aliens who they’d arrested, about to be executed in retaliation for the resistance. Adisa re-adjusted her plans and realized that they could take the convoy as an exit system if they moved quickly enough.

Finally, the moment when the speech reached a crescendo about the invulnerability of the Authority arrived, as the soldiers saluted, and at Adisa’s signal, all hell broke out. The microcharges went off, crippling the armored vehicles and throwing the troopers into chaos as the militia opened up with the lasers. Adisa and Shaed quickly rushed to toss grenades into the hatches of tanks under that cover while Doakes fired a single, perfect shot at the Commissar, and brought him down. The aliens about to be massacred cowered under the shootings, crying and screaming but cheered when they recognized her as she began running forward and lifting them back into the convoy as Doakes covered her. The small guerrilla band pulled out and fled, accepting the loss of the megawatt lasers they’d stolen in the ensuing chaos in exchange for the damage they’d just done to Rietarch state security and the lives they’d saved. 

The convoy was loaded up as the enemy finally began rallying, Doakes had done a number on their officers, and sped out, following along the path where Owens had set the charges to detonate to cover their exit. 

The blasts went off with a satisfying crunch as buildings dropped behind them, shielding them from pursuit until the enemy brought some of its hovercraft back from sectors where the resistance was a little more active.

**

Andonix leaned back in the command chair at the garrison base. Eighty-four militia, humans and Tyrsians dead, over a hundred clones and Rietarch soldiers eliminated, base secured. It had been a brutal battle but the two peoples had worked together well, overcoming the defenders, and he reflected on the enemy’s weakness. Humanity’s strength was in its madness and adaptability, so using clones that didn’t think for themselves made them easy opponents.

He had sent the message to Adisa that this sector was secure, and hoped she got it.

**

Murdoch took in the stream of incoming disasters from Rietarch with growing satisfaction. Adisa was still alive, that was unsurprising. Then he smiled, smugly, as he realized a far greater advantage. The Terran Republic fleet was already moving to reclaim Rietarch. And not long after they did, the Keldebriar fleet would arrive for their vengeance, not realizing that Terra had lost control of her erstwhile colony, and they’d attack in full fury at the betrayal, forcing Terra to handle one of the few species that qualified as a legitimate threat, and further alienating her from the rest of the galactic community. 

Which was the real goal, of course. Humanity would be at its strongest if it stood alone, without relying on the other species of the galaxy. Palnt could build machines, Galri could alter genetic codes and create wonders of life, where Nathians had food and energy infrastructure that was incredible, but humanity had been doing all that just fine before they became dependent. Human supremacy, at its core was a lie, but it was a convenient one to force humanity’s independence from the other species. Still, it was best that he not be seen on Rietarch until after the fireworks played themselves out. After all, he was officially dead.

***

Amelia was still in shock at the loss of her commanding officers, but the Khan had been ordered back to Procyon for refitting, but upon arrival, the Sabers were removed and replaced with a new fighter. 

The Rakshasa was a genuine beauty, completely divorced from the Saber frame. And its first test would apparently be against the Rietarch Authority, where Murdoch had been discovered. The Keldebriar had agreed to a temporary cease-fire in the aftermath of the LT’s adoptive sister helping them with a Kyriion outbreak, allowing the Alliance some breathing room to clean its own house. And, she reflected with no small amount of anxiety…she would be leading that operation.


	19. The Truth Comes Out

The Keldebriar had learned the truth of the ones responsible for the outbreak on Typhon Emerlis. They knew about the lost colony of Terra on Rietarch. They knew that the Terran navy was moving to capture the system, execute the monsters responsible, and find the ringleader.

Emperor Therion e’Klae was speaking with the Terran Republic president. “My own navy is mobilizing to assault the Rietarch system. We will not attack your people, and will fight alongside them in this battle. You may reclaim the system but we do demand that if those responsible for the attack on Typhon Emerlis are captured living that they be turned over to face Imperial justice.”

The president, one former Star Marshal, Maria Gonzales, paused and considered. “Humans take care of their own, Emperor. If he is captured by humans, he will be executed for his crimes, and your people may witness the act, however, if you capture him, you may do as you wish, provided that representatives of our people may witness. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Yes. That is acceptable. Our fleet will be there in a standard week.”

“Ours arrives in half that. After their surrender and Murdoch’s execution, we’ll meet for true peace negotiations.”

“Agreed.”

***

“Sergeant, it looks like Murdoch isn’t coming back to Rietarch. The Keldebriar and human fleets are both closing in, though. I have, however, found traces of an errant signal,” said Brimas, citing a type of variable pulse frequency that would be impossible to track without having locked onto it first, and as it changed frequency every standard second, only those with permission or the absolute best code slicers could lock onto it. It was a form of transmission frequently used in less-than-legal circles, and it was naturally the kind of thing Murdoch would use to get information about what was happening. The downside was that it partially blinded him in exchange for allowing him to remain unseen.

Well, unseen by all but the likes of Brimas Blorgi, anyway. “Do you have a lock on the coordinates? The uprising is well in hand, and with the fleet on its way, Rietarch will fall. But he still needs to die.”

Brimas swiveled one of his eyestalks to glare at her. “What do you take me for, Mamba?” Adisa chuckled and nodded as he rattled off the co-ordinates, and spoke to Ritia. “Take us there, quickly.”

Murdoch was on a tiny ship, one man, just large enough to have a rest pod and an eating room when on a long enough journey. She’d catch up to him and they’d have an ending to things, while the bulk of her crew saw to it that the resistance continued to advance.

**

Murdoch was observing, planning his next moves as word came in that that damn bleeding heart weasel had managed to quell the outbreak and broker a ceasefire with the Federation, meaning that his plan to spark a wider war was effectively over for now, but he wasn’t stupid. To attempt to rectify this particular failure was likely to result in his own death, and he wasn’t stupid enough to throw his life away for nothing when he could withdraw, lay low, and try again another day.

That was of course, assuming he had another day, which…

The smuggling ship dropped out of warp and magnetically force-docked with his, and no sooner had the airlocks opened than he found himself locked in combat with Adisa!

The two of them knew that guns in such close quarters were ill-advised, other than flachette pistols and both of them were wearing body armor that would limit the effectiveness of those. 

Adisa went for a grapple, parrying Murdoch’s knife with her own as she closed, driving an elbow into his diaphragm and making a lunge with her own blade for his knife wrist, only to have him get her in a wristlock and begin driving his own knife towards her throat before she writhed out and swept his legs from beneath him.

If it had been a movie, Brimas would have taken control of the audio on his ship and been prepared to broadcast it to all his followers. She’d have drawn out a confession. He’d have been stupid enough to go off on a motive rant. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a movie, Brimas did have audio control but they were both far too professional to waste air talking during a knife fight.

He managed to roll to his feet while swiping one of her knees with his boot at an angle that made it buckle, before tackling her as she went for the knife she’d dropped and starting to attempt, once more, to drive the blade into her throat. He was bulkier than she was. Brawnier. In a contest of brute force, she wasn’t stopping that blade long. Instead, she drove her nails, harshly, into pressure points on the back of his hands, making his grip loosen, so she could sucker-punch him and grab the blade as he rolled away.

As she moved towards him again, he drew his pistol and began firing short, professional bursts at her head. She was in motion and his hands were still cramped, so he missed, though the tiny spikes did futilely bury themselves in her body armor. He went to reload and she dove for him, though he was clever enough to entangle the knife she’d taken off him with the blade he’d taken from her earlier, so it wound up getting down to hand-to-hand yet again. He maneuvered carefully and slammed her face into the bulkhead, and she managed to get him with another foot-sweep and return the favor with interest before he kicked her in the stomach.

Murdoch was strong, but Adisa was fast. He threw punches, kicks, and knees harder than she did, but she finally, gritting her teeth over the brutal beating he was dishing out, got behind him and put him in a brutal chokehold. Murdoch was no fool, he knew how dangerous she was, he began driving his elbows backward into her, hard and fast, and after he broke her ankle with a stomping kick she bit her lip over a scream and let the pain bring them both to the floor, where her leverage improved. He continued to thrash and threw his head backwards, chipping a tooth, but her grip did not relent.

Hold tight and choke out. Her mind focused down to that simple imperative. All this would be worth it with Murdoch neutralized. He had cybernetic lungs but an organic windpipe, which meant that strangulation would still be lethal.

Finally, he stopped thrashing, and, knowing full well that people sometimes did that to lure an assailant into a false sense of security before sucker-punching them – hell, having used that trick herself a time or two – Adisa kept the pressure up, actually increasing it, and held that way for seven more minutes before finally letting go. 

Brimas boarded Murdoch’s tiny vessel and captured all the data, all the information he could from Murdoch’s terminals, and reported that he’d gotten full visual recording of the fight….but that bringing the body to prove he was down would still probably be a good idea.

“Adisa? Ma’am?” the undersized Vulpexi was visibly concerned by Adisa’s bloodied visage. “Ma’am, are you alright?” Adisa nodded, slowly, and muttered, “think the bastard broke a rib though. Gonna need some medical care…and some rest.”

Brimas blinked. He knew, partially thanks to his cousin’s studies that humans frequently ignored serious injuries to keep fighting but this was the first instance he’d seen up close. “Alright then.” He was gentle, did not wish to cause further injury to his colleague, friend and employer. 

**

Chief Petty Officer Amelia, Tiger Squadron, was preparing to deploy with the Squadron under her command this time. Rietarch Authority orbital control was sending threats. “You are in Rietarch Authority voidspace, power down your weapons and depart the system.”

“The Rietarch Authority is not recognized by the Federation or the Alliance of Free Species, you are still in Alliance voidspace.”

“You are in Authority voidspace, withdraw or we will send up intercepting craft.”

It wasn’t exactly professional, but Amelia had just lost several dozen friends in a war these assholes had started, and frankly the controller’s attitude was boring. “This is Tiger Squadron. Send ‘em up. We’ll wait.”

There was a long pause, during which no intercepting craft came from the planet. Unfortunately in that time gap Lion Fleet arrived, along with Second Armada, and Wolf Division’s full transport ship contingent, quickly descending and deploying to assist the resistance in seizing control of the planet.


	20. Beauty Born of War

On the Keldebriar world of Primian Elta, Callie faced a difficult decision. 

She was starting to throw up in their cell more and more often. Jake was currently giving her a light massage in the quiet cell the two of them had been thrown in to. The food was still good, but she’d had stranger and stranger cravings in the last few months and she was now well past her third period missed.

She’d thought it was impossible so long, it had been widely believed that people became infertile if they spent long enough basking in the stellar radiation that burned through space, but there was more and more suspicion that the supplements the Galri had created to prevent that might actually be doing its job better than intended and actually reversing the damage done years ago.

Callie took a deep breath. “Hey Jake? I’m…pretty sure I’m pregnant.” 

The gentle hands on her shoulders paused, and her husband whispered, “What?” in stunned, dazed tones.

“I think…I’ve missed three periods, Jake, and I’m getting morning sickness. How else would you explain it?” 

A long moment passed, and Jake whispered again, “Holy shit. You okay? Do you want to have the baby or?”

Callie wasn’t sure. On one hand, having a child would pretty effectively remove both of them from piloting for the foreseeable future. On the other hand…they had just been shot down. They’d both passed through so much death and destruction that the idea of bringing life into the world had always seemed like a pipe dream, but now that the possibility was open again… 

Was there a part of her that did want that? Was there a part of her that wanted to get out of the cockpit and actually give peace one more chance? But what happened if she was wrong? She couldn’t just have a kid, decide peacetime life wasn’t for her and then die out in space and leave the kid alone.

“I don’t know. But...I think it’s something we should probably...talk about.”

Jake nodded, still dazed. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know, are we ready for this?”

Callie shrugged. “I don’t know, but we did just get shot down, and we haven’t been the best officers for this squad that we should be. Face it, this might well be a sign that it’s time for us to settle down, build something. And…”

He didn’t need to hear her say it. “And we’ve lived so long as humans that there’s a part of you that wants to live like a Nathian. Building family, having hope, all that. Give peace a real chance, now that there’s an actual future for us. One we didn’t think was possible before, uh…well, before we found out we’re still fertile.”

She nodded. “Plus, there’s… I don’t know how long our luck is going to last. I want time before I really…before our luck runs out. If the war ends, we’ll probably have time to rest for a while, let something grow before anything else happens.”

Jake hugged her, the whole thing hitting him at once. “Oh fuck, Callie. We’re…we’re going to be parents, aren’t we?”

****

The news of what had happened at Rietarch spread throughout the galaxy rapidly. Ivari, in honor of Terran republic special forces rescuing their captured people from a terrorist sect, began sharing their information about the galaxy more openly.

The Blorgi phile had seized upon the information that the Consortium’s heads had been supporting the genocidal regime in Rietarch, and used that information to quickly bring them down and take control, and quickly began reforming the Vulpexi political system yet again, more egalitarian, fair trading practices, honest labor laws.

My friend Adisa had recovered, but she had been somewhat disillusioned by the Terran republic following being disavowed for political reasons. She resigned her commission from the military and became a citizen of the Free Economic zones, where she assisted the Blorgi in reforming for the benefit of the common person, and if occasionally a few of the more corrupt executives went missing, the bodies never found…

Well, only a fool would finger such a hero for something like that.

Rietarch was slowly rebuilt, leadership of the resistance heavily decorated. It was jointly claimed by Alliance, Federation, and Free Economic Zones, and renamed “Haven.” It was agreed upon by treaty to be a cultural exchange center for all the races, nations, and peoples within any of those three groups. A special garrison was formed to protect it against any who would damage it, mix of Human, Keldebriar and Tyrsian, in integrated units, known as the Spectrum Guard, under the command of Andonix. Doakes and Owens remained with the Guard, and Ritia…well, the Ivari renegade’s small craft was ideal for smuggling, and during the Esharioc’s nightmarish incursion, she risked life and limb again and again to bring those under siege life-saving supplies and smuggle refugees out.

Namna and Shen, for their part, continued to serve as goodwill ambassadors between the Alliance and Federation, still pausing to assist in any crisis they came across. Having met the two of them, I can confirm that they truly were the best ambassadors the Alliance could have hoped for. I only met Namna once, but her compassion and the determination she possessed to act on it, certainly impressed me, and I understood why the Keldebriar emperor had named her an honorary Exarch. 

Jake and Callie, however…

They’d returned to Tildas II, the world on which the Horizons had crashed. The one on which they’d been adopted and raised. The one above which they’d become a legend. Callie was definitely showing now, and the two of them dismounted their Rakshasas, the newer model fighters they’d been issued, and prepared, once more, to settle down. Amelia’s actions had proven she’d be a capable leader for Tiger Squadron moving forward, and the two of them…well, Nathians held family in high regard. They once again turned towards their own, or so they explained to me when I interviewed them. I suspect, given what I have learned in the years since, that with their own brush with death after being shot down, and their own realization that they struggled to care anymore, they were undergoing a crisis of faith as leaders, and needed to be allowed to resign. The two were now in their late thirties as humans reckoned such things, and had been fighting for over twenty years. 

Amelia eventually got their command slot, promoted rapidly to captain as it became apparent just how capable a leader she was, and the galaxy continued to grow. 

In time, the previous treaties were replaced during a signing at Haven. From here forward, the Alliance of Free Species, Federation of Starfaring Nations, and Free Economic Zones, as well as the Ambrin Confederacy, were brought together in the Hegemonic Union of Worlds, whose charter called for equality, cultural exchange, and a mandate to uphold and defend the rights of all sapient life.

- Endirmas Blorgi, Titans of Terra: Humanity’s rise in the galactic community, Volume Three: Revolt at Rietarch and Rise of the Hegemonic Union of Worlds.


End file.
